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Jeremy Cole, a DBA Team Lead/Database Architect at Twitter, gave a really good talk at the O'Reilly MySQL conference: Big and Small Data at @Twitter, where the topic was thinking of Twitter from the data perspective. One of the interesting stories he told was of the transition
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At a Cloud Computing Meetup, Siddharth "Sid" Anand of Netflix, backed by a merry band of Netflixians, gave an interesting talk: Keeping Movies Running Amid Thunderstorms. While the talk gave a good overview of their move to the cloud, issues with capacity planning, thundering herds, latency problems, and
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When building a system on top of a set of wildly uncooperative and unruly computers you have knowledge problems: knowing when other nodes are dead; knowing when nodes become alive; getting information about other nodes so you can make local decisions, like knowing which node should handle a request based
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Srinath Perera has put together a strong list of architecture patterns based on three meta patterns: distribution, caching, and asynchronous processing. He contends these three are the primal patterns and the following patterns are but different combinations: 1. LB (Load Balancers) + Shared nothing Units. Units that do not share anything
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Small Imrovements, makers of a hosted, lightweight feedback platform, have written an excellent article on Performance issues on GAE, and how we resolved them. They show how they trimmed most of their requests to between 300ms and 800ms, some still take 2 seconds when memcache is stale, and others clock
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Ali Sadat of MuleSoft gave interesting presentation at Saturday's Talk Cloudy to Me! event about their experiences moving Mule iON, their ESB (enterprise service bus) product to the cloud. First, a little about Talk Cloudy to Me. This event is the second one day cloud event put on
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In the post Using memcache might be free, but it's costing you money with instance pricing! Use instance caches if possible made on the Google App Engine group, Santiago Lema brings up an oldie but a goody of an idea that was once used to improve performance, but
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Sean Hull with two helpful posts: 5 Things That are Toxic to Scalability: 1. Object Relational Mappers. Create complex queries that hard to optimize and tweak. 2. Synchronous, Serial, Coupled or Locking Processes. Locks are like stop signs, traffic circles keep the traffic flowing. Row level locking is better than
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Jared Rosoff concisely, effectively, entertainingly, and convincingly gives an 8 minute MongoDB tutorial on scaling MongoDB at Scale Out Camp. The ideas aren't just limited to MongoDB, they work for most any database: Optimize your queries; Know your working set size; Tune your file system; Choose the right
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The world has changed. And some things that should not have been forgotten, were lost. I found these words from the Lord of the Rings echoing in my head as I listened to a fascinating presentation by Luiz André Barroso, Distinguished Engineer at Google, concerning Google's legendary past,
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One of the best projects I've ever worked on was creating a large scale web site publishing system that was almost entirely static. A large team of very talented creatives made the art work, writers penned the content, and designers generated templates. All assets were controlled in a
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Sean Hall with some really good MySQL advice: 1. Tune those queries. Biggest bang for your buck. Enable the slow query log and watch it. Once you've found a heavy resource intensive query, optimize it! Tune what receives real-world traffic. 2. Employ Master-Master Replication. Immediately have a read-only