Infrastructure for a “news-feed”

Question

I'd like to offer a news-feed like feature for users of our website. When the user logs in, he is shown a list of the latest updates across various areas of the site.

I'm afraid that this is going to be difficult to scale.

What are some networking / database topologies that can support a scalable infrastructure without having lots of copies of the same data? (I'd like to make it so if a piece of data is updated, each user's feed is also updated live).

Thanks for the assistance and advice.

Answer 1

1. Don't prematurely optimize.
2. This might be more of a question for the Server Fault crowd .
3. Performance at scale often requires having lots of copies of the same data - you tagged the question "facebook," and that's part of how Facebook does it. Twitter, too. You are asking for a system that's fast ("updated live"), cheap ("without having lots of copies of the same data") and good (does the previous two correctly). Pick two.