What happens when a website goes viral: how a site keeps up with millions of visitors
Database bottlenecks: why more web servers can make a site slower
A website is slow, so you add web servers. The website gets even slower, and every web server waits with nothing to do. The slow part is now the one part that all the servers share.
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Forty servers stand ready at 9:05, and the page still crawls. Watch one of them. Miva's request reaches it at once, and it has plenty of room for more, but it sits and waits.
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To answer her, it needs things it no longer keeps itself. So it sends a question on and waits for the reply, and the other 39 servers wait in just the same way.
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