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Items tagged scaling in May

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[...] by default Heroku will spin up multiple dynos in different availability zones. It also has multiple routers in different zones so if one zone should go completely offline, having a second dyno will mean that your app can still serve traffic.

Richard Schneeman # 16th May 2024, 5:44 am

Why does Django still not have support for multiple joins?

I don’t fully understand the question, but if you’re talking about doing a single join across multiple tables the Django ORM handles that just fine. Let’s say you want to get every BlogEntry written by a User who belongs to the Group with the name “admins”:

[... 67 words]

What’s powering the Content API? The new Guardian Content API runs on Solr, scaled using EC2 and Solr replication and with a Scala web service layer sitting between Solr and the API’s end users. # 24th May 2010, 2:08 pm

uuidd.py. Neat implementation of an ID server from Mike Malone—it serves up incrementing integers over a socket (using Python’s asyncore for fast IO) and records state to a file only after every 10,000 IDs served, so most of the time it’s not reading or writing to disk at all. If the server crashes it doesn’t matter because it can start up again at an integer it’s sure hasn’t been used before. # 25th May 2009, 9:34 pm

TwitterAlikeExample—redis. Excellent example of how you design a moderately complex system against a scalable key-value store (in this case redis). Most “how to build Twitter” code examples fail to address the hard problem of scaling user inboxes, but this one tackles it head on. # 21st May 2009, 11:14 pm

New Features for EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch. EC2 now fulfils the promise of “magic scaling in the cloud” out of the box—CloudWatch monitors performance of your EC2 instances without needing to install any monitoring software, Auto Scaling allows you to configure “scaling triggers” which start up new instances based on information from CloudWatch, and Elastic Load Balancing balances requests across all available instances. # 18th May 2009, 10:07 am

Scoble writes something—6,800 writes are kicked off, 1 for each follower. Michael Arrington replies—another 6,600 writes. Jason Calacanis jumps in—another 6,500 writes. Beyond the 19,900 writes, there’s a lot of additional overhead too. You have to hit a DB to figure out who the 19,900 followers are. [...] And here’s the kicker: that giant processing and delivery effort—possibly a combined 100K disk IOs—was caused by 3 users, each just sending one, tiny, 140 char message. How innocent it all seemed.

Isreal L'Heureux # 23rd May 2008, 7:28 pm

Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark launch” period where live pages simulated chat request traffic without showing any visible UI. # 15th May 2008, 7:55 am

Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour (via) Curse Gaming are getting impressive performance out of Django. # 24th May 2007, 4:11 pm

Wikipedia internals (PDF) (via) A gold mine of scaling tips. # 11th May 2007, 11:35 am

... Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that’s where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now.

Steve Grimm # 3rd May 2007, 10:36 pm

MintCache for Django. Caching scheme for Django that solves the dog-pile effect, where high traffic causes many processes to regenerate stale cached data at the same time. # 2nd May 2007, 8:49 am

The top 10 presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. I normally avoid linking to “top 10” lists on principle, but this one pulls together some great resources and adds extra context to each one. # 1st May 2007, 1:51 pm

Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation (via) Bruce Sterling on scaling up his annual SxSW party. I can’t believe I missed it htis year. # 22nd May 2004, 8:35 pm