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There's a story by Bryan Cantrill [1] about how he went to Twitter to help them understand why it would take 400 milliseconds of compute to process a request (I

There's a story by Bryan Cantrill [1] about how he went to Twitter to help them understand why it would take 400 milliseconds of compute to process a request (I'll leave the reveal to Bryan). Scaling horizontally is probably necessary for something the size of Twitter, but that doesn't mean that we can half-ass the code and just throw more machines at the problem. If we write code with a bit more mechanical sympathy and avoid the latest non-proven fads, we can surely write software that is 10x faster and requires much less scaling. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjFM8vw3pbU&t=3240s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjFM8vw3pbU&t=3240s

kaba0 4y ago
Twitter used to (not sure how much did that idiot fck it up) be quite great from this perspective from what I gathered. They had technical blog posts and are even featured in the famous data intensive book as an example for many scaling problems. Sure, they didn’t write it in assembly but instead use Java/Scala with Graal, but architecturally they had a sound system (plus what people routinely forget, the system should handle the general load, but it worths nothing if it fails at peaks, and twitter can easily hit a billion daily users during big global events)z
vidarh 4y ago
Oh, absolutely. I think in terms of making people think about putting things in-process in RAM and being a bit more imaginative at looking at machines sizes as worth exploring is a good thing, and the article is interesting as a look at what you can do. Many things can plausibly fit on a single machine irrespective of uptake (e.g. I worked on a system not long ago where even if we cornered the entire global market and the market expanded several magnitudes in size, our entire working set would still fit comfortable in memory). But even when you need to scale, it absolutely can scale better if you're willing to not automatically resort to a standard database stack for everything for example.
gnuvince 4y ago
Fixed timestamp: https://youtu.be/LjFM8vw3pbU?t=1613 https://youtu.be/LjFM8vw3pbU?t=1613

kaba0 4y ago

Twitter used to (not sure how much did that idiot fck it up) be quite great from this perspective from what I gathered. They had technical blog posts and are even featured in the famous data intensive book as an example for many scaling problems. Sure, they didn’t write it in assembly but instead use Java/Scala with Graal, but architecturally they had a sound system (plus what people routinely forget, the system should handle the general load, but it worths nothing if it fails at peaks, and twitter can easily hit a billion daily users during big global events)z

vidarh 4y ago

Oh, absolutely. I think in terms of making people think about putting things in-process in RAM and being a bit more imaginative at looking at machines sizes as worth exploring is a good thing, and the article is interesting as a look at what you can do. Many things can plausibly fit on a single machine irrespective of uptake (e.g. I worked on a system not long ago where even if we cornered the entire global market and the market expanded several magnitudes in size, our entire working set would still fit comfortable in memory). But even when you need to scale, it absolutely can scale better if you're willing to not automatically resort to a standard database stack for everything for example.

gnuvince 4y ago

Fixed timestamp: https://youtu.be/LjFM8vw3pbU?t=1613 https://youtu.be/LjFM8vw3pbU?t=1613