Here's my template for describing the architecture of a system. The idea is to have people fill out this template and that then becomes the basis for a profile. This is how the Friends for Sale post was created and I think that turned out well. People always
Example
Update: Anatomy of a crash in a new part of Yandex written in Django. Writing to a magic session variable caused an unexpected write into an InnoDB database on every request. Writes took 6-7 seconds because of index rebuilding. Lots of useful details on the sizing of their system, what
SSD
Update: Final Thoughts on SSD and MySQL AKA Battleship Spinn3r. Tips on how to make your database 10x faster using solid state drives. Potential exists for 100x speedup. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are the holy grail of storage. The promise of RAM speeds and hard disk like persistence have for years
Product
Update: Deployment with Capistrano by Charles Max Wood. Nice simple step-by-step for using Capistrano for deployment. From their website: Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back
Hadoop
Update: Yahoo! Launches World's Largest Hadoop Production Application. A 10,000 core Hadoop cluster produces data used in every Yahoo! Web search query. Raw disk is at 5 Petabytes. Their previous 1 petabyte database couldn't handle the load and couldn't grow larger. Greg Linden
Being an authentic human being is difficult and apparently authenticating all those S3 requests can be a bit overwhelming as well. Amazon fingered a lot of processor heavy authentication requests as the reason for their downtime: Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated
How do you plan to scale your system as you reach predictable milestones? This topic came up in another venue and it reminded me about a great comment an Anonymous wrote a while ago and I wanted to make sure that comment didn't get lost. The Anonymous scaling
Product
Update: GIGAOM on rPath Burns EC2 Appliances in a Web Portal. rBuilder adds a portal that lets users turn software into virtual appliances. rPath demoed their virtual appliance management system at Monday's AWS Meetup. What they do is help you build a generic virtual machine image deployable on
Tech Crunch chomped down on some initial scaling problems with Yahoo's new live video streaming service Yahoo Live. After a bit of chewing on Yahoo's old bones, TC spat out: If Yahoo cant scale something like this (no matter how much they claim it’s an
Product
From their website: There are a number of times in which you find yourself needing performance data. These can include benchmarking, monitoring a system's general heath or trying to determine what your system was doing at some time in the past. Sometimes you just want to know what
Example
How do you query hundreds of gigabytes of new data each day streaming in from over 600 hyperactive servers? If you think this sounds like the perfect battle ground for a head-to-head skirmish in the great MapReduce Versus Database War, you would be correct. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace&
Product
From FRESH Ports and their website: ISPman is an ISP management software written in perl, using an LDAP backend to manage virtual hosts for an ISP. It can be used to manage, DNS, virtual hosts for apache config, postfix configuration, cyrus mail boxes, proftpd etc. ISPMan was written as a