Techniques for Designing High-Performance Web Sites

This paper presents techniques for designing Web sites which need to handle large request volumes and provide high availability. These techniques include using multiple Web servers, TCP routers to distribute the load among available Web servers, Web server accelerators, and caching of dynamic pages. We present new techniques we have developed for keeping cached dynamic data current and synchronizing caches with underlying databases. We illustrate how many of these techniques were deployed at the official Web site for the 1998 Olympic Winter Games. Performance and high availability were critical for this site not only because it was on of the most popular sites on the Web during the event but also because the site was providing results which were constantly changing. The Olympic Games Web site achieved quick response times even under peak loads and was available 100% of the time.