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Platform

Interview

Tailrank originally a memetracker to track the hottest news being discussed
within the blogosphere.

We started having a lot of requests to license our crawler and we shipped that
in the form of Spinn3r about 8 months ago.

Spinn3r is self contained crawler for companies that want to index the full
blogosphere and consumer generated media.

Tailrank is still a very important product alongside Spinn3r and we're working
on Tailrank 3.0 which should be available in the future. No ETA at the moment
but it's actively being worked on.

The biggest challenge we have is the sheer amount of data we have to process and
keeping that data consistent within a distributed system.

For example, we process 52TB of content per month. this has to be indexed in a
highly available storage architecture so the normal distributed database
problems arise.

We've spent a lot of time in building out a distributed system that can scale
and handle failure.

For example, we've built a tool called Task/Queue that is analogous to Google's
MapReduce. It has a centralized queue server which hands out units of work to
robots which make requests.

It works VERY well for crawlers in that slower machines just fetch work at a
slower rate while more modern machines (or better tuned machines) request work
at a higher rate.

This ends up easily solving one of the main distributed computing fallacies that
the network is homogeneous.

Task/Queue is generic enough that we could actually use it to implement
MapReduce on top of the system.

We'll probably open source it at some point. Right now it has too many
tentacles wrapped into other parts of our system.

We index 24M weblogs and feeds per hour and process content at about
160-200Mbps.

At the raw level we're writing to our disks at about 10-15MBps continuously.

Right now the database is about 500G. We're expecting it to grow well beyond
this in 2008 as we expand our product offering.

It's mostly a function of customer feature requests. If our customers want more data we sell it to them.

In 2008 we're planning on expanding our cluster to index larger portions of the
web and consumer generated media.

We use Java, MySQL and Linux for our cluster.

Java is a great language for writing crawlers. The library support is pretty
solid (though it seems like Java 7 is going to be killer when they add
closures).

We use MySQL with InnoDB. We're mostly happy with it though it seems I end up
spending about 20% of my time fixing MySQL bugs and limitations.

Of course nothing is perfect. MySQL for example was really designed to be used
on single core systems.

The MySQL 5.1 release goes a bit farther to fix multi-core scalability locks.

I recently blogged about how these the new multi-core machines should really be
considered N machines instead of one logical unit: Distributed Computing Fallacy #9.

We use a federated database system so that we can split the write load as we see
more IO.

We've released a lot of our code as Open Source a lot of our infrastructure and
this will probably be released as Open Source as well.

We've already opened up a lot of our infrastructure code:

About 15 machines so far. We've spent a lot of time tuning our infrastructure
so it's pretty efficient. That said, building a scalable crawler is not an easy
task so it does take a lot of hardware.

We're going to be expanding FAR past this in 2008 and will probably hit about
2-3 racks of machines (~120 boxes).

Linux via Debian Etch on 64 bit Opterons. I'm a big Debian fan. I don't know
why more hardware vendors don't support Debian.

Debian is the big secret in the valley that no one talks about. Most of the big
web 2.0 shops like Technorati, Digg, etc use Debian.

Apache 2.0. Lighttpd is looking interesting as well.

About 95% of the pages of Tailrank are served from Squid.

We use ServerBeach for hosting. It's a great model for small to medium sized
startups. They rack the boxes, maintain inventory, handle network, etc. We
just buy new machines and pay a flat markup.

I wish Dell, SUN, HP would sell directly to clients in this manner.

One right now. We're looking to expand into two for redundancy.

Directly attached storage. We buy two SATA drives per box and set them up in
RAID 0.

We use the redundant array of inexpensive databases solution so if an individual
machine fails there's another copy of the data on another box.

Cheap SATA disks rule for what we do. They're cheap, commodity, and fast.

Tailrank has RSS feeds for every page.

The Spinn3r service is itself an API and we have extensive documentation on the
protocol.

It's also free to use for researchers so if any of your readers are pursuing a
Ph.D and generally doing research work and needs access to blog data we'd love
to help them out.

We already have the Ph.D students at the University of Washington and University
of Maryland (my Alma Matter) using Spinn3r.

PowerDNS. It's a great product. We only use the recursor daemon but it's FAST.
It uses async IO though so it doesn't really scale across processors on
multicore boxes. Apparenty there's a hack to get it to run across cores but it
isn't very reliable.

AAA caching might be broken though. I still need to look into this.

Donald Knuth is the man!

We're still working on finishing up a fully sharded database. MySQL fault
tolerance and autopromotion is also an issue.