Peter Van Dijck has a very good list of popular websites and how they manage scalability of their web application. He has presentations on scalability from websites like Twitter, Flickr, Slideshare and many others. Is it a very informative read and brings a lot of insight how it is done.
One thing that stood out is that the key lessons for most apps: Memcache like crazy, and optimize the database (the biggest bottleneck most of the time).
Looking trough the Memcache page I see that there are different API’s available for many popular languages. For CFML developers the Memcache Java API might be the most interesting one. Memcache goes beyond the cachedwithin of a cfquery and looks to be a solution for scalability. Else not all web apps would use it.
Another practive is “sharding”. Sharding is when you cut a really big table into pieces, so you can put those on separate servers.
All inall, a very good read and well worth your time.
