Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
Strategy
Dropbox saves one million files every 15 minutes, more tweets than even Twitterers tweet. That mind blowing statistic was revealed by Rian Hunter, a Dropbox Engineer, in his presentation How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped at PyCon 2011. The first part of the presentation is some Dropbox lore,
Strategy
This strategy targets reducing the amount of protocol data in packets by sending only the attributes that are needed. Google calls this Partial Response and Partial Update. Netflix posted about adopting this strategy in their recent Netflix API redesign. We've seen previously how Netflix improved performance by creating
Example
Mobile developers have a huge scaling problem ahead: doing something useful with massive continuous streams of telemetry data from millions and millions of devices. This is a really good problem to have. It means smartphone sales are finally fulfilling their destiny: slaughtering PCs in the sales arena. And it also
hot links
Submitted for your reading pleasure on this beautifully blue and sunny Friday... * @Werner: Each day #AWS adds enough computing muscle to power one whole Amazon.com circa 2000, when it was a $2.8 billion business http://wv.ly/gMr8LQ * Building servers to rule in hell. Datacenters spend a lot
Example
A lot has happened since my first article on the Stack Overflow Architecture. Contrary to the theme of that last article, which lavished attention on Stack Overflow's dedication to a scale-up strategy, Stack Overflow has both grown up and out in the last few years. Stack Overflow has
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Who's Hiring? * Kabam is looking for a Quantitative Analyst and a Senior Data Engineer to join the Business Intelligence group at our social gaming startup. * Opera Solutions is looking for Senior Software Engineers to work with Big Data analytics, Hadoop, Python, and Java for a rapidly growing analytics
Strategy
MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford explains how one key way to improve the scalability of a MySQL server, and undoubtedly nearly every other server, is to eliminate unnecessary SQL, saying the most efficient way to improve an SQL statement is to eliminate it: The MySQL kernel can only physically process a
Strategy
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." -- Aristotle A really nice Internet moment happened in the HackerNews thread Disqus: Scaling the World’s Largest Django Application, when David Kitchen crafted an awesome response to a question about
Example
This is an interview with Wade Simmons, an Infrastructure Engineer at SimpleGeo, a service making it easy for developers to create location-aware applications, on their increasing use of Node.js as a backend service component, replacing code that would have at one time been written in Java, Python or Ruby.
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Submitted for your reading pleasure on this cold and rainy Friday... * Quotable Quotes: * CarryMillsap: You can't hardware yourself out of a performance problem you softwared yourself into. * @juokaz: schema-less databases doesn't mean data should have no structure * Scalability Porn: * 3 Months To The First Million Users,
Paper
Video is hot on the Internet and people are really interested in knowing how to make it work. Dan Rayburn has a post pointing to a fascinating paper: An Experimental Investigation of the Akamai Adaptive Video Streaming, which talks in some detail about the protocols big players like YouTube, Skype
Example
Wordnik is an online dictionary and language resource that has both a website and an API component. Their goal is to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make