Sessions at PHP UK Conference 2012 about Scaling

Friday 24th February 2012

• Distribute the workload

  by Helgi Thorbjoernsson

  Many services / applications now a day are ill equipped with handling a sudden rush of popularity, as is often the case on the internet now a days, to a point where the services either become unavailable or unbearably slow.

  By taking a chapter from the ant colonies in the wild, where their strength lies in their numbers and the fact that everyone works together towards the same goal, we can apply the same principle to our service by using systems such as

  • load balancers
  • message queues
  • gearman
  • memcache
  • daemons

  and a few others, you can achieve greater performance, more redundancy, higher availability and have the ability to scale your services up and down as required easily.

  During this talk attendees will be lead through the world of distributed systems and scalability, and shown the how, where and what, of how to take the average application and splitting it into smaller more manageable pieces.

  • Distributed Computing
  • Scaling

  At 2:50pm to 3:35pm, Friday 24th February

  Coverage slide deck

• PHP at Scale

  by Ian Barber, Nikolay Bachiyski, Rasmus Lerdorf and Hugh E Williams

  The speakers will be discussing using PHP in high volume environments, the choices people made and why the made them.

  • PHP
  • Scaling

  At 4:50pm to 5:40pm, Friday 24th February

  Coverage video

Saturday 25th February 2012

• Challenges at scale: extreme data and platforms at eBay

  by Hugh E Williams

  Hugh Williams, the vice president of experience, search and platforms at eBay will us on a tour of key platforms used at eBay. From their Hadoop platform and data stores, to how PHP is used at eBay. Finally giving us some exciting insight to what's coming up that is cool at eBay in 2012.

  • eBay
  • Hadoop
  • Keynote
  • PHP
  • Scaling

  At 9:30am to 10:30am, Saturday 25th February

  Coverage video

• To a thousand servers and beyond: scaling a massive PHP application

  by Nikolay Bachiyski

  WordPress.com is an Alexa Top 20 web website, we get more than 100 million page views per day and 99% of the backend is PHP.

  The service has seen tremendous growth in the past couple of years. The presentation will explain how the system and copes with the load. This includes explanation of the software stack, scaling techniques and sharing lots of experience and real-life stats.

  Here are some of the topics covered:

  • Load balancers
  • PHP-FPM
  • Page-level caching
  • Object caching at the application level
  • Fail-safe and inexpensive serving of terabytes of user-uploaded files per day
  • Scaling MySQL databases
  • Distributing SQL queries between many servers with HyperDB
  • Asynchronous jobs system in PHP
  • 20 seconds deploy on a thousand servers, tens times per day
  • Staging servers for developers
  • Caching
  • PHP
  • Scaling

  At 12:00pm to 1:00pm, Saturday 25th February

  Coverage video slide deck