Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: Robot elephant from 1950, which consisted of 9000 parts and could walk 27 mp/h * Galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable planets. According to economic theory this should put a downward pressure on rents. * Quotable Quotes: * Brandon Downey: F*ck these guys. * @IEEEorg: Every
Paper
An interesting and different implementation approach: Tempest: Scalable Time-Critical Web Services Platform: Tempest is a new framework for developing time-critical web services. Tempest enables developers to build scalable, fault-tolerant services that can then be automatically replicated and deployed across clusters of computing nodes. The platform automatically adapts to load fluctuations,
Example
ESPN went on air in 1978. In those 30+ years think of the wonders we’ve seen! When I think of ESPN I think of a world wide brand that is the very definition of prime time. And it shows in their stats. ESPN.com peaks at 100,000 requests
Paper
Awesome paper on how particular synchronization mechanisms scale on multi-core architectures: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Synchronization but Were Afraid to Ask. The goal is to pick a locking approach that doesn't degrade as the number of cores increase. Like everything else in life, that doesn&
Strategy
Oh, you don't have a Quantum Computer Lab staffed with researchers? Well, Google does. Here they are on G+. To learn what they are up to the Verge has A first look inside Google's futuristic quantum lab. The lab is partnership between NASA, Google, and a
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Who's Hiring? * Apple is hiring for multiple positions. Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. * Sr. Software Engineer. You will primarily work with the domain team including project managers and engineers, as
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Guest post by Thierry Schellenbach, Founder/CTO of Fashiolista.com, follow @tschellenbach on Twitter and Github Fashiolista started out as a hobby project which we built on the side. We had absolutely no idea it would grow into one of the largest online fashion communities. The entire first version took
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out. * $465m: Amount lost in 45 minutes due to a software bug. Where? Where else...the finance industry. * Quotable Quotes: * FCC: Fiber-to-the-home, on average, has the best performance in terms
Strategy
This question comes from Ulysses on an interesting thread from the Mechanical Sympathy news group, especially given how multiple processors are now the norm: Ulysses: 1. On an 8xCPU Linux instance, is it at all advantageous to use the Linux taskset command to pin an 8xJVM process set (co-ordinated as
Strategy
In a People of ACM interview with Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, GFS, etc), talks about a few interesting aspects of Google's culture. What Made Google Google Progress is a modern idea. The conviction that future can be changed for
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Hey, it's HighScalability time: Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out. * $3.5 million: Per Episode Cost of Breaking Bad * Quotable Quotes: * @GammaCounter: "There are 400 billion trees in the Amazon River basin, close to the number of stars
Book
If you are Google you don't just complain about performance on the web, you do something about it. Doing something about web performance is the job of one Ilya Grigorik, Developer Advocate, Make the Web Fast at Google, and author of a great new book: High Performance Browser