When you set up a web application, often you will start small with everything running on one server. Everything, in this case, typically means the application and the database and data files. That is nice and simple. It has the advantage that everything it fast because it is all one the one server.
The capacity is, however, limited. Suppose the load on your application increases. You can get some way just by upgrading the one server, adding more memory and faster processors, but that will only get you so far.
Eventually, you will have to scale out. You will get a number of separate web servers, with a load-balancer to distribute the incoming requests between them. All the web servers will connect to a shared database sever, or cluster of database servers. The files will probably go on a separate file server.
While this increases the total load that the whole system can support, it means, paradoxically, that processing a single request is slower. For example, if you switch from one server to three servers (application server, database and files) your site will not support three times as many users. The scalability will not be linear. That is because every connection to the database or to get a file now has to travel over the network. Accessing something across a network tends to be an order of magnitude slower than accessing something on the same server.
The above is all standard knowledge about scaling web applications. I have been thinking about about it recently because it explains the way my working life has been evolving. Just over six months ago I was working essentially on my own, re-developing the Moodle question engine. I had been working away like that for a year, and I had got a lot done.
Since then, things have changed, and I am now managing a team including three other developers, and two out-sourced development contracts. It has been particularly 'bad' this last couple of weeks as one development period of the project came to an end and I had to review a lot of code, and then I had to sort out everything we were supposed to be doing for the next three months. I am starting to wonder if I will every get any of my own development work done at all!
That is, however, just some exasperation showing. I know really that this has just been a brief spell with an excessive amount of administration. Overall I am happy that the OU is investing so much in its eAssessment systems (and the other parts of its VLE); as a team we are achieving more than I could on my own; but right now my inner geek would really like to go and hide in a cave for a while and just write code undisturbed.
