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I have a Rails app that uses MySQL, MongoDB, NodeJS (and SocketIO). Right now, the app (everything) is hosted inside 1 box. I would like to know what I should do when the number of users grow. What factors should I take into account to determine whether I need to host a separate element in another box (like MySQL, Node, Mongo in each of its separate box). Should I just make that one single box bigger? Is there a best-practice method that I can go with?

If you guys can provide me with reference, guides, research regarding this topic. Please do. I am super noob at deployment and server configuration.

denniss
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We faced this dilemma at work a short while ago and found that simply upgrading to a more powerful single box sufficed and would give us room to grow further by up to 3-4 times.

The most important thing would be to identify your potential bottlenecks.

In our case there were 2 bottlenecks. Disk I/O and the database's ability to utilise memory.

On our new server we had the hard drive array configured in such a way as to maximise the disk I/O and we upgraded the database software to allow it to use more memory. In fact the DBMS now keeps the entire database in memory and only performs write operations to the disk as needed. This significantly improved performance.

Hades
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The short answer is move everything to its own box. The longer answer is: it depends on your app's usage.

I recommend you use Nagios or similar to monitor your app's resource utilization -- that is, how much CPU and RAM each of your services use. When one starts to each up too much resources (and your page load speed is negatively affected), move that to its own box.

Then continue to monitor that box, beef up when necessary or shard out.

The high scalability blog is good for reading on what other people have done.

Jesse Wolgamott
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