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Arne Blankerts, Stefan Priebsch - High-Performance Websites

This talk contains information about architecture.

Classical Architecture

When have done this for quite a while.

Browser->WebServer->PHP-Database

This works best in the past. General solution was to add more hardware and that leads to more errors.

• monolithic architecture
• normalized data (in database)
• pull-principle (browser is build per request)
• full page cache is bad
• edge site include (for varnish/ESI) is also not the best solution

We are fast when:

• no real workload per request
• everything from memory
• denomalized data
• snippets

How Often Does Data Change (From Rare To Often)?

Based on the example of a shop system.

• catalog
• product information
• price
• availability

Who Changes Data?

• editor
• product manager
• receipt of goods / outgoing goods

New Architecture (CQRS-Architecture)

• images and static content is deliverd by static content webserver
• only dynamic part is done by php
• snippets are deliverd, not full pages

PHP->Key-Value-Store->Backend-Process->Database
or
PHP->Web-Service->Database

Benefit of key-value-store (for example redis) is, that the database itself can die and the only thing that happens is, that the entries are becoming obsolete.

But What About Filternavigation?

Use a searchengine that returns simple a collection of product keys. Use this product keys and ask the key value store to fetch product data.

But What About Personalization?

• use snippets with variables and default values
• fetch this snippet in the key value store
• thanks to "time to death" feature provided by many key-value-stores, you can easily define "special offers" per day and so on

Nice meetup, incredible how many people are attending already.