Simon Willison’s Weblog

How We Made GitHub Fast. Detailed overview of the new GitHub architecture. It’s a lot more complicated than I would have expected—lots of moving parts are involved in ensuring they can scale horizontally when they need to. Interesting components include nginx, Unicorn, Rails, DRBD, HAProxy, Redis, Erlang, memcached, SSH, git and a bunch of interesting new open source projects produced by the GitHub team such as BERT/Ernie and ProxyMachine.

# 21st October 2009, 9:14 pm / github, scaling, nginx, unicorn, rails, drbd, haproxy, replication, redis, erlang, memcached, ssh, git, proxymachine, ruby, bert, ernie

I like Unicorn because it’s Unix. Ryan Tomayko analyses Unicorn, a new, pre-forking Ruby HTTP server that makes extensive use of Unix syscalls and idioms, and asks why dynamic language programmers don’t take advantage of these more often.

# 7th October 2009, 11:42 am / ruby, exec, fork, programming, ryan-tomayko, unicorn, unix