Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Blogmarks tagged scaling in 2010

Filters: Type: blogmark × Year: 2010 × scaling × Sorted by date


Using MySQL as a NoSQL—A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server. Very interesting approach: much of the speed difference between MySQL/InnoDB and memcached is due to the overhead involved in parsing and processing SQL, so the team at DeNA wrote their own MySQL plugin, HandlerSocket, which exposes a NoSQL-style network protocol for directly calling the low level MySQL storage engine APIs—resulting in a 7.5x performance increase. # 27th October 2010, 11:10 pm

Bees with machine guns! Low-cost, distributed load-testing using EC2. Great name for a useful project—Bees with machine guns is a Fabric script which fires up a bunch of EC2 instances, uses them to load test a website and then spins them back down again. # 27th October 2010, 11:04 pm

Three new features for reddit gold. Reddit’s experiments with a subscriber program are interesting to watch. 9,000 people signed up as subscribers without there being any benefit at all, and they’re now being rewarded with the ability to opt out of ads and access to computationally expensive features (like different ways of sorting their own user page) that wouldn’t scale for the entire user base. # 20th July 2010, 5:54 pm

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

twitter’s gizzard (via) Intriguing new open source project from Twitter. Gizzard is a sharding framework which provides a network service for partitioning data across arbitrary backend datastores, managing its own forwarding table to map key ranges to partitions and adding support for tree-based replication. # 11th April 2010, 9:39 pm

Notes from a production MongoDB deployment. Notes from running MongoDB for 8 months in production, with 664 million documents spread across 72 GB master and slave servers located in two different data centers. # 28th February 2010, 11:05 pm

Django Advent: Scaling Django. Mike Malone’s advice on scaling Django applications, including taking advantage of new features in 1.2. # 26th February 2010, 7:22 pm

Search Engine Time Machine. Detailed explanation of how ElasticSearch provides high availability, through clever sharding and replication strategies and configurable gateways for long-term persistent storage. # 17th February 2010, 10:32 pm

Elastic Search (via) Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported. # 11th February 2010, 6:33 pm

dogproxy. Another of my experiments with Node.js—this is a very simple HTTP proxy which addresses the dog pile effect (also known as the thundering herd) by watching out for multiple requests for a URL that is currently “in flight” and bundling them together. # 3rd February 2010, 1:05 pm