High Scalability - Comments

Tavi comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Tavi — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:34:53 +0000

Architecture... right... what about features that simply do not work, like for example... SEARCH! or do not exist... like cleaning up the uploaded resources in the case of theme developers?

P.S. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE Tumblr for its simplicity but some things can really step on your toes...

Benoit Bonneville comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Benoit Bonneville — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:54:25 +0000

@Ben Uretsky

Using nginx/php-cgi is more performant, but you have to take care of :
- Your script have to be absolutly lockless and very responsive. A "long" execution time script (but < 1s) could block one CGI process and this should be awfull for the whole server.
- You need to find a "perfect" php version, because one process will execute more requests than respowned one with apache. With some versions you could have some bad surprise.

From my own experience, it take more time to have a nice reliability on (nginx)/fastcgi.

Steve Francia comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Steve Francia — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:53:45 +0000

This post says

MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don't.

in multiple places, but MySQL doesn't shard. This is not a feature of MySQL no will it ever be.

Applications partition the data before sending it to MySQL. This requires the application (or an application layer) to be completely aware of the partitioning and manage it. In doing so you've now removed most of the core functionality of RDBMS (joins, transactions, foreign key integrity). It begs the question of why use SQL it all when we've neutered all the essential features of SQL in our pursuit of scaling to the required capacity.

Yes it is possible to use the MySQL technology to do this, but ultimately you are no longer using it like a RDMBS. It's got all the weight of the features your not able to use and is now heavily dependent on the application. Seems like it would be smarter just to use a database designed for this kind of operation and scale from the ground up.

Craig comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Craig — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:24:15 +0000

Too much noise is made about scalability, Even at this level, it really isn't that difficult.

All this article shows is that you can have a really terrible architecture and still sustain pretty huge traffic.

Andrew Petersen comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Andrew Petersen — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:38:47 +0000

Matt, thanks for the tip about evernote. I took at look at this article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/5/23/evernote-architecture-9-million-users-and-150-million-reques.html, assuming it's the one you were thinking of?

I was really hoping someone might have a link to the actual paper the interviewee mentioned.

Matt Brown comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Matt Brown — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:53:27 +0000

Is there any more information about this Cell Based Architecture? Those keywords are pretty generic for the Googles...

Also check out the writeup on Evernote on this site; they have a similar "cell" architecture.

Andre Morris comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Andre Morris — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:04:31 +0000

The cost to manage all of this must be enormous. The company is backed by Venture Capital but I wonder how much money they are losing year over year to keep it running?

Steven Pemberton comments on Is it time to get rid of the Linux OS model in the cloud?

Steven Pemberton — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:07:55 +0000

So the future is one big i-Series box? :)

v_ comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

v_ — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:33:57 +0000

What about virtualization ? Do they use only hardware servers ?

Jagbir comments on Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Jagbir — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:54:47 +0000

An awesome read about technologies inside tumblr. Thanks for posting the article, to the point and very informative.