Abstract

This is the story of how I helped make arm.com run on a small collection of state-of-the art ARM-based microservers, and the lessons I learned along the way, from how not to crash your entire multi-node MySQL database several times a day, to how not to have nginx consume all your disk space within a few minutes, all the way through to how to build a rock solid PHP application that is *truly* scalable to almost any size. This talk is great if you’re into buying your own hardware and want to save on total cost of ownership. But it’s also filled with great advice for anyone who’s ever needed to scale PHP. We had to find a way to scale every aspect of the web stack, all the way from where we kept files on the disk through to where logs got written, where traffic was routed, where sessions were stored and where the database ran. It was an incredible journey, and I learned more on this project than on any other. Technology highlights include nginx plus, which works nicely as a caching reverse proxy and Percona XtraDB, a horizontally scalable form of MySQL, plus lots more interesting ways to make running an application across many servers slightly less terrifying.