Patrick Lenz has started in on a case study The adventures of scaling, in four instalments, on how he made eins.de scale, improving its performance by about 60%.

The online community site was ported from 50,000 lines of PHP to 5,000 lines of Rails. It serves up over 1 million dynamic page impressions on a “good day”. This first instalment goes through their unsuitable initial setup and explains why it didn’t work, including a diagram of their configuration. As one of the article’s commenters says, “Nothing beats a shiny chart”. Looks promising. Good start. Thanks for the write up Patrick. Stay tuned.