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This guest post is written by Josh Fraser, co-founder and CEO of Torbit. Torbit creates tools for measuring, analyzing and optimizing web performance. Did you know that 5% of the pageviews on Walmart.com take over 20 seconds to load? Walmart discovered this recently after adding real user measurement (RUM)
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In Zen And The Art Of Scaling - A Koan And Epigram Approach, Russell Sullivan offered an interesting conjecture: there are 20 classic bottlenecks. This sounds suspiciously like the idea that there only 20 basic story plots. And depending on how you chunkify things, it may be true, but in
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My impression of DynamoDB before attending a Amazon DynamoDB for Developers talk is that it’s the usual quality service produced by Amazon: simple, fast, scalable, geographically redundant, expensive enough to make you think twice about using it, and delightfully NoOp. After the talk my impression has become more nuanced.
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A consequence of Service Oriented Architectures is the burning need to provide services at scale. The architecture that has evolved to satisfy these requirements is a little known technique called the Cell Architecture. A Cell Architecture is based on the idea that massive scale requires parallelization and parallelization requires components
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Martin Thompson, a high-performance technology geek, has written an awesome post, Fun with my-Channels Nirvana and Azul Zing. In it Martin shows the process and techniques he used to take an existing messaging product, written in Java, and increase throughput by 32X and reduce latency by 20X. The article is
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The EuroSys 2012 system conference has an excellent live blog summary of their talks for: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (thanks Henry at the Paper Trail blog). Summaries for each of the accepted papers are here. One of the more interesting papers from a NoSQL perspective was Cache Craftiness
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The adding jitter strategy was one of the most commented on techniques from 7 Years Of YouTube Scalability Lessons In 30 Minutes on HackerNews. Probably because it’s one of the emergent phenomena that you really can’t predict and is shocking when you see it in real life. Here’
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Update: Organism without a brain creates external memories for navigation shows slime mold is even cooler than originally thought, storing a record of where it's been using slime: The authors conclude, the slime isn't just the mold's calling card. Instead, it's a
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This is a guest post by Matt Abrams (@abramsm), from Clearspring, discussing how they are able to accurately estimate the cardinality of sets with billions of distinct elements using surprisingly small data structures. Their servers receive well over 100 billion events per month. At Clearspring we like to count things.
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Martin Thompson wrote a really interesting article on the beneficial performance impact of taking advantage of Processor Affinity: The interesting thing I've observed is that the unpinned test will follow a step function of unpredictable performance. Across many runs I've seen different patterns but all similar
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If you started out building a dating site and instead ended up building a video sharing site (YouTube) that handles 4 billion views a day, then it’s just possible you learned something along the way. And indeed, Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube, did learn a
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This is a guest post by Steve Newman, co-founder of Writely (Google Docs), tech lead on the Paxos-based synchronous replication in Megastore, and founder of cloud service provider Scalyr.com. Microsoft’s Azure service suffered a widely publicized outage on February 28th / 29th. Microsoft recently published an excellent postmortem. For