Architecture and design of high volume web sites (a brief history of IBM sport and event web sites)

Architecting and designing high volume Web sites has changed immensely over the last six years. These changes include the availability of inexpensive Pentium based servers, Linux, Java applications, commodity switches, connection management and caching engines, bandwidth price reductions, content distribution services, and many others. This paper describes the evolution of the best practices within IBM in architecting sites that handle millions of page views per day. Discussed is the transition to multi-tiered architectures, the use of publish/subscribe software to reduce Web site hits, the migration from static to dynamic content, and techniques for caching of dynamic and personalized content. Copyright 2002 ACM.