Strategy
Debugging complex problems is 90% persistence and 50% cool tools. Brendan Gregg in 10 Performance Wins tells a fascinating story of how a team at Joyent solved some weird and challenging performance issues deep in the OS. It took lots of effort, DTrace, Flame Graphs, USE Method, and writing custom
Strategy
Urs Hoelzle, infrastructure guru and SVP at Google, made a really interesting statement about the economics of scale in the datacenter: We’ve shown that when you run a large application in the datacenter, like Gmail, you can, compared to a small organization running their own email server, you can
Strategy
Amir Salihefendic, founder of Todoist and Wedoist, in How to create very reliable web services, has written an insightful post on strategies for creating reliable web services along with the tools needed to make it happen. * Realtime monitor everything. Create a clear picture of what's going on at
Strategy
In the wake of the recent Amazon problems Ryan Lackey offers some practical first responder cloud survival advice: If you're a large site (particularly a PaaS) on AWS and care about availability, you need to have spare capacity in your region (using Reserve Instances, like Netflix does) to
Strategy
Are all instances created equal? Perhaps because under multi-tenancy multiple virtual machines run on the same physical host, not all applications will run equally well on every instance. In that case it makes sense to measure and move to a better performing instance. That's the interesting idea from
Strategy
Travis Reeder in Spikability - An Application's Ability to Handle Unknown and/or Inconsistent Load gives four good ways of handling spikey loads: 1. Have more resources than you'll ever need. Estimate the maximum traffic you'll need and keep that many servers running. Downside
Strategy
Wildly popular VC blogger Fred Wilson defines in an excellent 27 minute video the ten most important criteria he uses when deciding to give the gold, that is, fund a web application. Note, this video is from 2010, so no doubt the ideas are still valid, but the importance of
Strategy
In Taming The Long Latency Tail we covered Luiz Barroso’s exploration of the long tail latency (some operations are really slow) problems generated by large fanout architectures (a request is composed of potentially thousands of other requests). You may have noticed there weren’t a lot of solutions. That’
Strategy
Ilya Grigorik has written another wonderful article lavishly detailing the extraordinary tactics Chrome employs to hide network latency from users: Chrome Networking: DNS Prefetch & TCP Preconnect. Ilya springs some surpising factoids on us, revealing how the web has slowed and super sized: * The size of an average page has
Strategy
The ever amazing slime mold is not the only way to solve complex compute problems without performing calculations. There is another: soap film. Unfortunately for soap film it isn’t nearly as photogenic as slime mold, all we get are boring looking pictures, but the underlying idea is still fascinating
Strategy
In Secrets to Lightning Fast Mobile Design, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger shares three strategies Instagram uses to outsmart high latency mobile networks and make mobile apps feel faster than they really are, which helped Instagram reach 12 million users in 12 months: * The motivation: "mobile experiences fill gaps while
Strategy
Edward Capriolo has a really interesting article on his dramatic performance expanding experience of turning on compression for Cassandra. The idea: * Enabling compression shrunk 71GB of data down to 31GB, which caused more data to fit in RAM, which reduced disk IO to nearly nothing. * Compression means more data can