From time to time, people ask me to post something about the technology behind Phish.net. I'd started writing this piece several times, but ultimately, never completed it. Given the problems that Phish.net experienced in the last few days, it seemed the right time to share not only a little bit about how we can host a site that sustains an onslaught of traffic during shows, but also powers our Phish.net API and, in turn, sites around the internet.

As Phish.net has grown in breadth and size, the codebase has ballooned into a major project. There are thousands of users - often tens of thousands of concurrent users - during shows. Maintaining a site of this size can be unwieldy. There are currently over a quarter of a million lines of PHP and CSS, over 700,000 lines of code altogether that make up Phish.net and its services (including the API, the administrative backend, the mobile site, etc). Read on for the painfully technical details.

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