Scalability, in Graphical Form, Analyzed

I'm at Surge, this week, where I just listened to Baron Schwartz give a talk about scalability and performance.  As usual, Baron was careful to distinguish between performance (which is how fast it is) and scalability (which is how much faster you can make it by adding more resources).  One of the things Baron talked about was Neil Guenther's Universal Scalability Law, which attempts to model the behavior of complex systems (such as database systems) as you add threads, or nodes, or users.

SURGE Recap

Bruce Momjian and I spent Thursday and Friday of last week in Baltimore, attending Surge.  It was a great conference.  I think the best speakers were Bryan Cantrill of Joyent (@bcantrill), John Allspaw of Etsy (@allspaw), and Artur Bergman of Wikia (@crucially), but there were many other good talks as well.  The theme of the conference was scalability, and a number of speakers discussed how they'd tackled scalability challenges.  Most seem to have started out with an infrastructure based on MySQL or PostgreSQL and added other technologies around the core database to improve scalability, especially Lucene and memcached.  But there were some interesting exceptions, such as a talk by Mike Malone wherein he described building a system to manage spatial data (along the lines of PostGIS) on top of Apache Cassandra.

Some general themes I took away from the conference: