Simon Willison’s Weblog

Database Sharding at Netlog, with MySQL and PHP. Detailed MySQL sharding case study from Netlog, who serve five billion page requests a month using thousands of shards across more than 80 database servers.

Posted 2nd March 2009 at 10:22 am

Recent articles

The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025

databases 109 mysql 81 netlog 1 php 181 scaling 143 sharding 13

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