At Scale Even Little Wins Pay Off Big - Google and Facebook Examples

There's a popular line of thought that says don't waste time on optimization because developing features is more important than saving money. True, you can always add resources, but at some point, especially in a more mature part of a product lifecycle: performance equals $$$.

Two great examples of this evolution come from Facebook and Google. The upshot is that when you spend time and money on optimizing your tool chain you can get huge wins in performance, control, and costs. Certainly, don’t bother if you are just starting, but at some point you may want to switch to big development efforts in improving efficiency.

Facebook and HipHop

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 8, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 34TB : storage for GitHub search; 2,880,000,000: log lines per day
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @peakscale: The "IKEA effect"  << Contributes to NIH and why ppl still like IaaS over PaaS. :-\
  • @sheeshee: module named kafka.. creates weird & random processes, sends data from here to there & after 3 minutes noone knows what's happening anymore?
  • @sometoomany: Ceased writing a talk about cloud computing infrastructure, and data centre power efficiency. Bored myself to death, but saved others.


• Lots of heat on Is MongoDB's fault tolerance broken? Yes it is. No it's not. YES it is. And the score: MongoDB Is Still Broken by Design 5-0.


• Every insurgency must recruit from an existing population which is already affiliated elsewhere. For web properties the easiest group to recruit is the younger demographic. They naturally want something different than their elders and they have fewer allegiances to defend. What's your counter insurgency strategy?

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Ask HighScalability: Web asset server concept - 3rd party software available?

This article describes the idea of a website asset service for the author's dynamic websites. It deals as a request for comments and also as a request for hints to existing 3rd party software.

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Super Bowl Advertisers Ready for the Traffic? Nope..It's Lights Out.

Advertising for the Super Bowl is bigger than the game for many viewers. So you gotta figure advertisers are ready for the traffic bursts generated by their expensive ads? Not exactly...

Yottaa reports an amazing 13 advertiser websites crashed during the Super Bowl. Coke was interactively au currant, asking viewers to vote for the ending of a commercial, but load times went to 62 seconds. SodaStream, Calvin Klein, Axe, Got Milk? The Walking Dead, many movie sites, and many car sites, all were flagged with delay of fame penalties.

Lots of time, money, and creative energy is spent lovingly perfecting every detail of these commercials. It won't be a surprise to any programmer that this can't usually be said of the follow through on the backend.

So what can you do? Yottaa has some good tips and Michael Hamrah has a wonderful post on dealing with the Super Bowl Burst Problem:

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Ask HighScalability: Memcached and Relations

Hi everybody

I'm wondering what you would do: I develop a webapp using Grails, Memcached and Mysql as persistence. Now, I have following domain classes (simplified):

Product: Can be in one category
Category: Can have nested children, and have multiple products.

I need to access all product objects by id which led me to the idea to store all products in one big Memcached-entry with a key: PRODUCTMAP and as value, all product attributes as array, like: [productId1: [title: 'title'], productId2: [title: 'title']]

If I browse to category 4, I simply get my map categoryMap with value [cateoryId: [productId1, productId2]]
I also can list all products of a certain category by providing that id. 

The bad thing about this is that I always have to put back everything if I modify a single product.

Who can give advice how to realize that?
Any help will be appreciated! 

Thanks,

Best
Sullivan 

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Is Provisioned IOPS Better? Yes, it Delivers More Consistent and Higher Performance IO

Amazon created a whole new class of service with their Provisioned IOPS for RDS, EBS, and DynamoDB. The idea is simple. If you want more performance, you turn a dial up. If you want less, you turn a dial down. A beautifully simple model. You pay for the performance you want, which is different than their previous cloud model, where performance varied, but you paid only for what you used. 

The question: Do these higher priced services really work better?

Rodrigo Campos put this question to the test (only for EBS) by running a benchmark he describes in IOMelt Provisioned IOPS EBS Benchmark Results - December 2012.

The result? Yes, AWS Provisioned IOPS Volumes Really Deliver More Consistent and Higher Performance IO:

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 1, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 400 milliseconds : modern private wire for Natural Gas; 620,000: size of a mobile phone botnet; 1 million cores: jet noise modeling supercomputer; 2.2 petabytes per gram: DNA with storage density; 1 billion: Google's one quarter infrastructure spend
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @StartupLJackson: "Good thing we spent 6mo on scalability pre-launch. The thing went hyper-viral day one, just as planned." - nobody ever.
  • @dysinger: WELCOME TO DEVOPS ADVENTURE! YOU ARE STANDING INSIDE AWS. NEARBY IS AN ANGRY ELB. THERE ARE SOME SSH KEYS ON THE GROUND.
  • ~‏@levie: Well cloud computing was fun while it lasted; now we can just store all our data in DNA strands.
  • @mtnygard: Debates about “Tech X > tech T” aren’t religious wars. They’re also economic wars.
  • @alfonsol: I do not believe your per load number of socks requires scalability.
  • @mikeolson: Latency breeds contempt.
• Next step after service orientation? Symbioses. The world swarms with symbiosis. 
• How EVE Online servers deal with a 3,000 person battle. There's nothing to throttle as servers run at 100%. The game is sharded by solar system, multiple solar systems run on a machine are moved when a machine becomes overloaded. Some games are run on machines with exceptional hardware. The trickiest strategy to deal with large battles is time dialation, time is slown down. Interesting discussion on Hacker News about game design,  bandwidth requirements and state management techniques. 

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Better Browser Caching is More Important than No Javascript or Fast Networks for HTTP Performance

Performance guru Steve Souders gave his keynote presentation, Cache is King! (slides), at the HTML5DevCon, besides being an extremely clear explanation of how caching works on the Internet and how to optimize your use of HTTP to get the best performance, Steve ran experiments that found some surprising results on what gave the best web site performance improvements.

In his base line test, page loads took 7.65 seconds (median of three runs). What change--Fast Network, No Javascript, or Primed Cache--would make the biggest performance improvement? It was Primed Cache.

• Fast Network - Using a fast FIOS network the load time was 4.13 seconds. Steve was surprised how big a difference this made, given how much work must happen in the browser. 
• No JavaScript - 4.74 seconds after disabling JavaScript. Both reduces transfers and skips parsing by the browser. Steve thought the effect would have been larger.
• Primed Cache - 3.46 seconds using a warm cache, less than half than the empty cache page view time because it reduced the number of HTTP requests and reduced the total transfer times. Key for mobile where higher latencies are common.

The implication being that caching is important so you must understand how HTTP caching works and how to make the best use of it. That's the rest of the talk.

Some key takeaways: 

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DuckDuckGo Architecture - 1 Million Deep Searches a Day and Growing

This is an interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Duck Duck Go and general all around startup guru, on what DDG’s architecture looks like in 2012.

Innovative search engine upstart DuckDuckGo had 30 million searches in February 2012 and averages over 1 million searches a day. It’s being positioned by super investor Fred Wilson as a clean, private, impartial and fast search engine. After talking with Gabriel I like what Fred Wilson said earlier, it seems closer to the heart of the matter: We invested in DuckDuckGo for the Reddit, Hacker News anarchists.
                  
Choosing DuckDuckGo can be thought of as not just a technical choice, but a vote for revolution. In an age when knowing your essence is not about about love or friendship, but about more effectively selling you to advertisers, DDG is positioning themselves as the do not track alternative, keepers of the privacy flame. You will still be monetized of course, but in a more civilized and anonymous way. 

Pushing privacy is a good way to carve out a competitive niche against Google et al, as by definition they can never compete on privacy. I get that. But what I found most compelling is DDG’s strong vision of a crowdsourced network of plugins giving broader search coverage by tying an army of vertical data suppliers into their search framework. For example, there's a specialized Lego plugin for searching against a complete Lego database. Use the name of a spice in your search query, for example, and DDG will recognize it and may trigger a deeper search against a highly tuned recipe database. Many different plugins can be triggered on each search and it’s all handled in real-time.

Can’t searching the Open Web provide all this data? No really. This is structured data with semantics. Not an HTML page. You need a search engine that’s capable of categorizing, mapping, merging, filtering, prioritizing, searching, formatting, and disambiguating richer data sets and you can’t do that with a keyword search. You need the kind of smarts DDG has built into their search engine. One problem of course is now that data has become valuable many grown ups don’t want to share anymore.

Being ad supported puts DDG in a tricky position. Targeted ads are more lucrative, but ironically DDG’s do not track policies means they can’t gather targeting data. Yet that’s also a selling point for those interested in privacy. But as search is famously intent driven, DDG’s technology of categorizing queries and matching them against data sources is already a form of high value targeting.

It will be fascinating to see how these forces play out. But for now let’s see how DuckDuckGo implements their search engine magic...

Information Sources

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