Twelve Step Program For Scaling Web Applications On PostgreSQL

On Tuesday night this week Wanelo hosted a monthly meeting of S

  • San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group, and I gave a talk that presented a summary to date of Wanelo’s performance journey to today. The presentation ended upo being much longer than I originally anticipated, and went on for an hour and a half. Whoops! With over a dozen questions near the end, it felt good to share the tips and tricks that we learned while scaling our app.

The presentation got recorded on video, but it’s not a very good quality unfortunately.

In the meantime, you can see the slides for it :)

12-Step Program for Scaling Web Applications on PostgreSQL

Are you addicted to slow application performance? Are you ready to make a change? :) In this presentation, I tell the story of how Wanelo grep our application to serve nearly 3000 requests per second in just a few months, while keeping latency low, and tackling each new growth challenge that came their way. He breaks down their story into a 12-step program for scaling applications atop PostgreSQL. The talk covers topics ranging from traditional slow query optimization, vertical and horizontal sharding with PostgreSQL, serializing and buffering frequent writes, as well as using services to abstract scalability concerns.

With PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.3 as the primary data store and Joyent Public Cloud as their hosting environment, the team at Wanelo keeps optimizing the application stack over and over again using an iterative approach, to keep the latency low, uptime high, and users happy :)

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