7 ms·

Not like this is a problem I have to worry about. But where on earth does one learn this stuff? The talk is useful - as an overview of what they use - but I k

Not like this is a problem I have to worry about. But where on earth does one learn this stuff? The talk is useful - as an overview of what they use - but I know nothing of how to implement a single step.

sushi 16y ago
I think most of it comes from experience, sticking to fundamentals and learning from the mistakes of others but don't listen to me. I'm a noob to all this stuff myself.
buro9 16y ago
It's called experience. Which perhaps sounds rude, but it's not meant to be. This stuff isn't taught per se, you learn it bit by bit as you solve each problem that you face. I learned about HAProxy when my site load exceeded that which a single web server could manage. I learned about heartbeat when I had to update my HAProxy and it knocked the site offline. I learned about master/slave replication of databases when a site I worked on had considerably more reads than writes and scaling vertically (buying a bigger box) cost more than scaling horizontally (adding cheap read slaves). I learned of sharding when I worked on a graph stored in an Oracle database and performing calculations on the whole graph exceeded that one physical box. I learned of one-hop replication to solve the problem of a sharded graph. I learned of partitioning to solve the problem of having one big database and the computability not being maxed but the storage being maxed. I learned of memcached when I wanted to reduce page generation times and realised going to the database was more expensive than keeping it in cheap RAM elsewhere on the network: http://www.buro9.com/blog/2010/11/18/numbers-every-developer-should-know/ http://www.buro9.com/blog/2010/11/18/numbers-every-developer... I learned of reverse proxy caches when I wanted to make sure requests for things already served never reached the web layer again. I learned about Varnish when I considered that most reverse proxies use disk storage for their cache. We can go on and on here, but the message is that you learn these things one at a time solving real problems that you come up against. There is always the next hurdle to jump through, and when you get there you too will learn how to get past it. I'd emphasise that you cannot attempt to do this prematurely, that premature optimisation quote really applies well to architecture too. Keep things as simple as they can be and just know that when you get to a hurdle that someone else has already solved it and you've just got to find out where it's written down (if anywhere), what they used, how they approached it, the upsides, downsides, what they'd do differently, etc. You could try sites like http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/ but I would urge you not to implement things without knowing why you're implementing them. Don't cargo cult ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult ) this stuff, it's really key to do only what you need to do, when you need to do it.
- grovulent 16y ago
  seriously dude... write that book... Cause i can't find it anywhere...
  - patio11 16y ago
    This is one of those books that the market is basically incapable of publishing, because its like "Hey why don't you do 6 months of hard work and then we'll pay you a $10,000 ~ $20,000 advance which you will never earn out" when Plan B looks like "Save some large company whose system being down is costing $X00,000 a day, make client look like hero, get compensated accordingly."
    - buro9 16y ago
      And as I was trying to emphasise in my post, there's not a "right way" to do things, some problems just make some approaches more right than others in those instances. Just with Bentley's Programming Pearls book, he underlines again and again that knowing your problem is more important than knowing the best algorithms, the one that will work for you depends on your problem and only you know that. Highscalability.com and shared slidedecks act as a community generated set of architectural patterns, but no-one should implement them without knowing what their problems will be.
      - grovulent 16y ago
        What I don't understand - and perhaps will be incapable of understanding until I face these issues myself (and hopefully I will in the future) - is why this view that scaling is in a sense un-documentable... What is it about scaling an application that can't be reduced to an algorithm - at some level of abstraction at least, so newbies can at least get an idea of how they should start thinking about it. To put the question in another way - could a framework like django ever come to provide scaling tools out of the box? Or is it just something that fundamentally can't be reduced. Might it be that there just haven't been enough people who have faced scaling problems that repeatable patterns haven't yet become obvious?
patio11 16y ago
I have some experience with optimizing, scaling, and administering less-than-web-scale systems. Much of the knowledge comes from reading posts like this or presentations (thank God for Slideshare), or attending conferences where they give talks with titles like How We Scaled Linkedin (that was JavaOne if I remember correctly, and that talk was single-handedly worth the price of sending me to America for my company). You can also learn from observation when working with people who are better than you. This is one of the best reasons to have some industry experience prior to raring off into startup land. I am a much, much, much better engineer in 2011 than I was in 2007 partly because I am older and wiser but mostly because I sat next to the second best engineer I've ever met and took notes when he told me that everything I knew was wrong. Then there is the last option: your lack of expertise with X bites you in the keister, you fix X, you now have expertise with X and hopefully write up your experience somewhere to decrease the net amount of keister-biting in the world.

sushi 16y ago

I think most of it comes from experience, sticking to fundamentals and learning from the mistakes of others but don't listen to me. I'm a noob to all this stuff myself.

buro9 16y ago

It's called experience. Which perhaps sounds rude, but it's not meant to be. This stuff isn't taught per se, you learn it bit by bit as you solve each problem that you face. I learned about HAProxy when my site load exceeded that which a single web server could manage. I learned about heartbeat when I had to update my HAProxy and it knocked the site offline. I learned about master/slave replication of databases when a site I worked on had considerably more reads than writes and scaling vertically (buying a bigger box) cost more than scaling horizontally (adding cheap read slaves). I learned of sharding when I worked on a graph stored in an Oracle database and performing calculations on the whole graph exceeded that one physical box. I learned of one-hop replication to solve the problem of a sharded graph. I learned of partitioning to solve the problem of having one big database and the computability not being maxed but the storage being maxed. I learned of memcached when I wanted to reduce page generation times and realised going to the database was more expensive than keeping it in cheap RAM elsewhere on the network: http://www.buro9.com/blog/2010/11/18/numbers-every-developer-should-know/ http://www.buro9.com/blog/2010/11/18/numbers-every-developer... I learned of reverse proxy caches when I wanted to make sure requests for things already served never reached the web layer again. I learned about Varnish when I considered that most reverse proxies use disk storage for their cache. We can go on and on here, but the message is that you learn these things one at a time solving real problems that you come up against. There is always the next hurdle to jump through, and when you get there you too will learn how to get past it. I'd emphasise that you cannot attempt to do this prematurely, that premature optimisation quote really applies well to architecture too. Keep things as simple as they can be and just know that when you get to a hurdle that someone else has already solved it and you've just got to find out where it's written down (if anywhere), what they used, how they approached it, the upsides, downsides, what they'd do differently, etc. You could try sites like http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/ but I would urge you not to implement things without knowing why you're implementing them. Don't cargo cult ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult ) this stuff, it's really key to do only what you need to do, when you need to do it.

grovulent 16y ago
seriously dude... write that book... Cause i can't find it anywhere...
- patio11 16y ago
  This is one of those books that the market is basically incapable of publishing, because its like "Hey why don't you do 6 months of hard work and then we'll pay you a $10,000 ~ $20,000 advance which you will never earn out" when Plan B looks like "Save some large company whose system being down is costing $X00,000 a day, make client look like hero, get compensated accordingly."
  - buro9 16y ago
    And as I was trying to emphasise in my post, there's not a "right way" to do things, some problems just make some approaches more right than others in those instances. Just with Bentley's Programming Pearls book, he underlines again and again that knowing your problem is more important than knowing the best algorithms, the one that will work for you depends on your problem and only you know that. Highscalability.com and shared slidedecks act as a community generated set of architectural patterns, but no-one should implement them without knowing what their problems will be.
    - grovulent 16y ago
      What I don't understand - and perhaps will be incapable of understanding until I face these issues myself (and hopefully I will in the future) - is why this view that scaling is in a sense un-documentable... What is it about scaling an application that can't be reduced to an algorithm - at some level of abstraction at least, so newbies can at least get an idea of how they should start thinking about it. To put the question in another way - could a framework like django ever come to provide scaling tools out of the box? Or is it just something that fundamentally can't be reduced. Might it be that there just haven't been enough people who have faced scaling problems that repeatable patterns haven't yet become obvious?

patio11 16y ago

I have some experience with optimizing, scaling, and administering less-than-web-scale systems. Much of the knowledge comes from reading posts like this or presentations (thank God for Slideshare), or attending conferences where they give talks with titles like How We Scaled Linkedin (that was JavaOne if I remember correctly, and that talk was single-handedly worth the price of sending me to America for my company). You can also learn from observation when working with people who are better than you. This is one of the best reasons to have some industry experience prior to raring off into startup land. I am a much, much, much better engineer in 2011 than I was in 2007 partly because I am older and wiser but mostly because I sat next to the second best engineer I've ever met and took notes when he told me that everything I knew was wrong. Then there is the last option: your lack of expertise with X bites you in the keister, you fix X, you now have expertise with X and hopefully write up your experience somewhere to decrease the net amount of keister-biting in the world.