Systems Management News has up an interview with Ron Gorodetzky, enterprise architect for Digg. It’s an interesting look at the challenges Digg faced scaling to meet it success (over 26 million unique visitors a month). They’re using a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), with MogileFS as their backend distributed file system. To help manage their infrastructure, Digg uses Puppet.

Ron highlights a commom problem all architects face when they try to scale their software: the database.

“The first pain point we hit was just database stuff. The first thing you’ll notice is when you start to grow these queries, the database can’t commit as much time to committing a certain query as it used to,” said Gorodetzky. “You’ll find the normal things that work, suddenly don’t. You’ll find that, one day, you’ll see a spike in your graphs telling you that something’s going slower. Once you do that, you get to the point where the database part is as fast as it can be, you cache things.

You can read the full article HERE.