How Stuff Works has posted a very interesting article on how Digg works. Not only do they get into the history of how Digg came about but they also give an inside look at Digg’s technology framework.
For a Web site that receives more than 200 million page views a month (April 2006), Digg’s technology framework is pretty streamlined. As with any proprietary system, Digg’s technical department doesn’t just put it all out there for everyone to copycat. But there are bits and pieces to be gleaned. The entire setup is based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), a programming model that ties together server applications running, say, PHP, with something like a MySQL database. It allows multiple languages to converse over a system architecture with minimal translation hold-ups. In the Diggnation podcast recorded on June 14, 2006, Kevin Rose puts the total number of servers in the area of 75.
Anyway you look at it, 75 servers is nothing to sneeze at. It’s way more than what I have! The article goes into possible corruption at Digg as well. It’s a good read and well worth checking out.