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Here's a common situation and question from the mechanical-sympathy Google group by Avinash Agrawal on the black art of capacity planning: How to get started with sizing and capacity planning, assuming we don't know the software behavior and its completely new product to deal with? Gil
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PayPal gives yet another glowing report of an app rewritten in node.js experiencing substantial performance improvements. PayPal rewrote their account overview page, one of the most trafficked apps on the website, which was previously written in King Java. The benefits: 1. Full-stack engineers. Using JavaScript on both the front-end
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If you code in PHP have you ever wondered about moving to Facebook's HipHop JIT Virtual Machine for PHP? With HipHop Facebook achieved over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption compared to Zend PHP 5.2 engine + APC. But
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Jeremy Edberg gave a talk on Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion–Pitfalls and Lessons and one of the issues they had was that they: Did not account for increased latency after moving to EC2. In the datacenter they had submillisecond access between machines so it was possible
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Netty is a high-performance NIO (New IO) client server framework for Java that Twitter uses internally as a protocol agonostic RPC system. Twitter found some problems with Netty 3's memory management for buffer allocations beacause it generated a lot of garbage during operation. When you send as many
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Jeff Dean gave a talk at SFBay ACM and at about 3 minutes in he goes over how Google runs jobs on computers, which is different than how most shops distribute workloads. It’s common for machines to be dedicated to one service, say run a database, run a cache,
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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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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
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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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When two titans of the early computing industry, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, had a chance to sit down for a chat at the C2SV conference last Friday, we learned how a little foresight and luck can decide futures. Steve Wozniak's Success - Expandability
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Power on a cell phone is like water in a desert. It’s the very stuff of life. If you take the same naive programming techniques you learned when programming on a server in a datacenter your cell phone will die of thirst. This is dramatically shown by Reto Meier,
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This is a guest post by Nick Burling, VP of Product Management of Bluestripe. Readers of High Scalability know are well versed in performance optimization techniques. Reverse proxies, Varnish, Redis — you hear about them daily. But what you may not realize is that one of the oldest technologies in your