There are many aspects of a site with a large number of users that can bring the site to its knees. Some of this can be slowness of the features while others can be physically locking the system to a point that it is no longer responsive. In this chapter, I will do my best to address some of the possible issues that might come up with a community.

We will discuss issues at the database level in the form of indexing and partitioning our data. We will dive into how we can address application slowness by throwing more hardware at it and then load balancing that hardware. We will also discuss how to cache data dips and complex object creation so that we don't have to perform the queries or object manipulation every time. Next, we will speed up our search by creating highly optimized, indexed data sets. And finally we will look at reducing the number of systems our website speaks to directly so that our user experience is not directly impacted by infrastructure.