Capacity Management

Planning and managing capacity for a fast-growing website can be a balancing act between buying too little/late, and too much/soon.

Your process of capacity planning should be adaptive, adjustable, and include more than just system statistics. Measurement, architecture, and economics are all equally important to having your site perform. Becoming popular doesn’t have to mean being afraid your site will fall over from too much load.

I’ll talk about safety factors, data mining your capacity metrics, automating the forecasting process, and what makes a good capacity dashboard.

This talk will take a look at different approaches to traditional capacity planning, and how we do it at Flickr.com. I’ll include some real-world challenges we’ve faced and the lessons learned from them.