How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day

Ravelry is an online knitting and crochet community run by husband and wife team Casey and Jessica Forbes. A few weeks ago they did an interview with Tim Bray where they revealed that their site has over 400,000 registered users and does 3.6 million pageviews per day - though ultimately 10 million requests a day hit Rails (they have significant API, RSS and AJAX usage).

Todd Hoff of HighScalability.com then collected together all of the details he could find about Ravelry and put it together into "How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails. " It's well worth reading through Ravelry's stack info, but if you want the Cliff Notes version they're using:

• Xen virtualization
• HAProxy
• Nginx
• Tokyo Cabinet (for large object storage)
• Nagios
• New Relic
• Amazon S3
• Amazon Cloudfront (for CDN)
• Sphinx
• Memcached

Also worth a visit, if you care to know about Ravelry's history, is this 30 minute interview with Y KNIT - a popular knitting podcast.