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Running a website in Load Balancing environment

Thursday, February 26th, 2009 by Dmitry Andrejev

I find this topic very interesting especially these days when Internet is already used by millions and millions of users and websites moved  into the era of dynamic content and social networks dealing with enormous amount of users. I am sure we all agree that more traffic your website gets more processing power will be used on the server to deliver the content.

So let’s pretend that our website is starting to slow down and what took a split second to load before takes twice or more time now. Would should you do? Well, at first I recommend to make sure that website is programmed well and uses allocated resources efficiently. Then it would make sense to put more “stuff” in your server (if you have one of course - smile) to boost the processing power. What to add and how much it costs I’ll definitely cover in a different topic. If we got this far that means we already have an extremely powerful server and
still barely keeping the head above the water. This is when it’s time to start thinking about Load Balancing environment to make our website fly again.

So what’s a definition of Load Balancing? It’s a technique to spread work between two or more computers, networks or other resources in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput and at the same time minimize a response time.  Sounds a bit complex, right? It also means that you running a successful website which probably drives you a lot of healthy traffic and it might be a good time start thinking about putting it in Load Balanced environment!

Version Control Systems and why we need them

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 by Dmitry Andrejev

These days Version Control Systems (also known as Revision or Source control) becoming more and more popular and used in world of computers and Internet. The main purpose of these systems is to provide it’s users with the ability to maintain multiple versions of the same document in electronic format.

Just imagine the situation when your project has two or more participants and all of them need the ability to quickly and securely access the files, save and share their changes with others, and sometimes go back in time and revert changes. Yes, it’s clearly not the task that can be easily done by the human being. Exactly for this
reason people developed these type of systems called Version Control.

There are plenty to choose from if you decided to get one for yourself. One of the oldest and respected ones is CVS (Concurrent Versions System) founded in 1990 and also used by Intechnic. Overall there are about 30 plus different version control systems on the market today. Some of them are Open Source and Proprietary Software (require license).