Last year I was surprised to be going to Velocity.  Read the post, it was an adventure.  But, I really like the conference.  It is the perfect conference for me.  While a good majority of my work is done coding PHP/MySQL apps, I tend to focus on architecture, frameworks, performance and that kind of stuff.  So, a web performance and operations conference is just perfect.

Last year, I was on a panel with some great guys.  I was able to share just a bit about my experience dealing with the instant success of a web site.  This year, my proposal was accepted to talk more about dealing with success of a web site.  The talk will be focused on my experience at dealnews.com and from working with power users for Phorum.  Here is the summary:

Lots of people talk about scaling and performance. But, are they preparing for all the things that could happen? There are multiple problems and there is not one solution to solve them all.

Everything is running fine and BAM! – your site is linked from the front page of Yahoo! What do you do? How can you handle that sudden rush of traffic. Requests per second are running 5x normal levels. Servers have CPU spikes. Daemons are hitting the maximums. You are running out of bandwidth. How could you have been prepared for this? What are the tools and techniques for this type of sudden rush?

Or, lets say you have just come out of a meeting where everyone discovered that your site is growing in traffic 70% – 80% year over year. That means that 1 million page views this month will be nearly 3 million this time in 2 years. How can you plan for that? You don’t want to redesign the whole architecture every 2 years. What methods could be used to deal with this constant long term growth?

While there is no magic bullet for either of these scenarios, there are techniques used by many sites out there to help you get through these situations. This session will cover some of these techniques and talk about their pros and cons.

I must admit, this if the first time since 2000 that I am a little intimidated to speak at a conference.  The people that present and attend Velocity are so awesome.  I just hope I don't disappoint.