Scaling read-heavy web services

Building scalable applications or improving scalability of existing ones is important and not an easy task to perform. Although every application is unique, they can be categorized in several classes. Similar solutions may be applied when scaling applications which belong to the same class. This paper covers five different techniques for scaling read-heavy web services delivering small amount of data for each request. The techniques analyzed include database scaling, horizontal and vertical architectural scaling, as well as two caching techniques [2]. The service is Ruby on Rails [6] based, but similar approaches may be applied when using other technologies. Advantages and disadvantages of each method are presented, as well as several suggestions related to further research on this topic.