How would I go about building a website that can handle lots of users?

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
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What technologies do I need to know to build a web application that a large number of users can access? What concepts/issues should I be aware of?

I can make a simple web application that will work for myself, but how to I make it so that will work for everybody. > 500 concurrent users.

Thinking of a website to let people put in to do lists and stuf. It's just something to learn with, however I want to plan it to be capable of handling the load.
 

Argo

Lifer
Apr 8, 2000
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Ace, it's not really an easy thing to answer. Firstly, it all depends - is your site static or dynamic?

If it's a static website (bunch of html pages with images) - there isn't much magic to it. Choose web server of your choice (apache or IIS to name a few). After that it's all about putting enough hardware in place. With > 500 concurent users you may want some sort of redundency, but once again with static content it shouldn't be too hard.

If the site is to serve dynamic content it gets a lot more complicated. First of all, you need to decide what framework you're going to use (J2EE, .NET, PHP, etc). Depending on what you pick the implementation would be quite different.
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
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It will be dynamic content. :) Are there any common issues that come up? Is there any way to estimate how many concurrent users can be on one server?
 

Argo

Lifer
Apr 8, 2000
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The answer depends on what technology you decide to use. Each one comes with it's own set of problems and issues.
 
Dec 27, 2001
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500 concurrent users means you will have up to 500 people simultaneously making requests on your web server. I doubt AT even has that. If you did have that you'd want those requests broken across multiple servers each with crazy amounts of memory.

As for which technology, it would be either ASP or PHP.

If, as I suspect, you mean 500 unique visitors, then anything will work and I'd suggest you go with whatever you find easiest to learn.