Scaling Web Applications and Tagging - Digg, Del.icio.us, StackOverflow

Question

How do websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and StackOverflow implement tagging?

I know this other question has an accepted answer of a many-to-many relation with a cross ref table. But how do the "big boys" do it? The same way? How is it scaling?

Answer 1

Here is the oft-quoted article which breaks down tagging schemas by real performance metrics: http://tagging.pui.ch/post/37027746608/tagsystems-performance-tests

The author notes that the founder of delicious explains using an RDBMS for tagging simply does not scale to many millions of items under load. An alternative like Lucene may fit better in such a case.