CakePHP TV

Working at Future Publishing Plc, I worked on the relaunch of CyclingNews.com, the world's largest cycling website. During the Tour de France and other large races, the traffic peaks that the site receives can easily reach well over a million visits an hour and thousands of requests per second during live coverage. The talk will detail the lessons that have been learned by my team when making websites and CMS with CakePHP that serve many visitors but with very limited hardware costs. I begin by detailing the problems we came across when making TotalFilm.com - another CakePHP site. I will then talk through how we made that site scale overnight - using memcache and nginx - and then talk through the problems we identified when we were scoping CyclingNews. I will describe the architecture we designed before the build, the evolution of that architecture as we learnt lessons throughout the build and the final platform we came up with. I will then talk through what we would do differently and invite questions and/or ideas from the audience. There were not many CakePHP experts in the team before the project started but I think the lessons we learned and the way we solved the problems were fairly unique. We appreciated early that no framework could scale to the loads we were expecting, on the hardware budget that we had, but we still found a way to use the rapid development features of CakePHP and scale to the loads we were expecting. We also fell just a little in love with CakePHP while doing it.