What Happens While Your Brain Sleeps is Surprisingly Like How Computers Stay Sane

There's a deep similarity between how long running systems like our brains and computers accumulate errors and repair themselves. 

Reboot it. Isn’t that the common treatment for most computer ailments? And you may have noticed now that your iPhone supports background processing it reboots a lot more often? Your DVR, phone, computer, router, car, and an untold number of long running computer systems all suffer from a nasty problem: over time they accumulate flaws and die or go crazy.

Now think about your brain. It’s a long running program running on very complex and error prone hardware. How does your brain keep itself sane over time? The answer may be found in something we spend a third of our lives doing. Sleep.

There’s new research out on how our brains are cleansed during sleep that has some interesting parallels to how we keep long running hardware-software systems up and running properly. This is a fun topic. Let’s explore it a little more...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 20th, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time (with so much cool info this week it will blow your mind):

Amazing microscope image of a carnivorous bladderwort

• How many drones would it take to replace Santa? With a fleet of some 80 million or so F-16 drones the entire worldwide delivery could be completed in just over eight hours. Impressive, but a world without Rudolf is not a world I wish to contemplate.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @Loh: Always wanted to travel back in time to try fighting a younger version of yourself? Software development is the career for you!
  • @mraleph: often devs still approach performance of JS code as if they are riding a horse cart but the horse had long been replaced with fusion reactor
  • @peakscale: "The c3.large is 40% faster and has more than double the memory than the c1.medium but costs about the same"
  • @techmilind: Conversation with an ex-Yahoo, now at a Telecom company. Replaced $22M of Teradata by $450K of Hadoop in AWS. It's the economics, stupid!
  • Brett Slatkin: But Doom was a huge success anyways. Those things didn't matter. Carmack's team made the right vastly simplifying assumptions. It was worth it. This is how you apply the ethos of "worse is better" and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.


• OK, I understand why Gregor Rothfuss doesn't like how PHP chose function names to minimize hash collisions. It makes for strange names. But come on, isn't it sort of geeky cool too? Why should we let some arbitrary aesthetic sense create a world of baseless conformity? I love that this choice comes from such a pure technical ontology that it has transformed into artistic expression.


• Et tu, Brute? NASA Drops OpenStack For Amazon Cloud. Ouch, that has to hurt. When a major contributor to an alliance defects it's not a good sign for the strength of the alliance. Of course paying off key players is a time honored way of crushing alliances.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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How to get started with sizing and capacity planning, assuming you don't know the software behavior?

Here's a common situation and question from the mechanical-sympathy Google group by Avinash Agrawal on the black art of capacity planning:

How to get started with sizing and capacity planning, assuming we don't know the software behavior and its completely new product to deal with?

Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO & Co-Founder, wrote a very understandable and useful answer that is worth highlighting:

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22 Recommendations for Building Effective High Traffic Web Software

This is a guest post by Ashwanth Fernando, Software Engineer from the trenches at large scale internet companies.

Inspired by the book "Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch, I wanted to share my holistic recommendations on building high traffic web software (i.e. web applications/services that serve high traffic loads). Some of these items may not be just about software design but also around surrounding areas such as the engineering organization, culture etc.

Two disclaimers up front:

1) This is my opinion.
2) There will be real world situations where the below principles will be wrong as in all things "software". Please use common sense all the time.

Consider using more than one datacenter

There have been numerous horror stories about businesses, ahem going out of business because they just had a single datacenter. Its really important to have more than one data center if you want to protect yourself from natural disasters or electrical supply failures. Run all your datacenters in active-active configuration. It may cost extra money, but its well worth it rather than having an active passive configuration and then finding out at the end that for some pieces of data, your passive hardware was not consistent with the active one.

Consider a sparse datacenter deployment

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 13th, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out.

• 80 billion: Netflix logging events per day; 10 petabytes: Ancestry.com data; six million: Foursquare checkins per day; 
• Quotable Quotes:
  • George Lakoff: What can't all your thoughts be conscious? Because consciousness is linear and your brain is parallel. The linear structure of consciousness could never keep up.
  • @peakscale: "Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems" - Scott Adams
  • @kiwipom:  “Immutability is magic pixie dust that makes distributed systems work” - Adrian Cockcroft 
  • @LachM: Netflix: SPEED at SCALE = breaks EVERYTHING. #yow13
  • Joe Landman: … you get really annoyed at the performance of grep on file IO (seriously folks? 32k or page size sized IO? What is this … 1992?) so you rewrite it in 20 minute in Perl, and increase the performance by 5-8x or so.
  • @rjrogers87: "Goldman Sacs has 36,000 employees, 6,000 are developers.  They support these folks w/half-a million cores. #GartnerDC” 
  • @KentLangley: Dear Amazon AWS, Please STOP with the aggressive reserved instances sales push. I use on-demand ON PURPOSE.


• Good story of how nearby.lk moved from Google App Engine to EC2, nodejs, and mongodb. Migration decision based on: ease of development, performance and cost. GAE suffers from slow database operatations, costly over provisioning of instances, slow startup times lead to timeouts, low 1MB memcache size limit, bulk loads and exports of data a nightmare, search is slow. Like about nodejs: one programming language on client and server, portability, fast. Like from GAE: could see everything in one place with the management console, easy deployment, easy to create new code and test it out.


• Wikipedia's Order of Magnitude page: The pressure of a human bite is about 1/9th of the atmospheric pressure on Venus. The fastest bacterium on earth is just outstripping the fastest glacier. A square meter of sunshine in the spring imparts about 1 horsepower.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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Using Node.js PayPal Doubles RPS, Lowers Latency, with Fewer Developers, but Where Do the Improvements Really Come From?

PayPal gives yet another glowing report of an app rewritten in node.js experiencing substantial performance improvements. PayPal rewrote their account overview page, one of the most trafficked apps on the website, which was previously written in King Java.

The benefits:

1. Full-stack engineers. Using JavaScript on both the front-end and the back-end removed an artificial boundary between the browser and server, allowing engineers to code both.
...

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Sponsored Post: Booking, Spokeo, Apple, NuoDB, ScaleOut, MongoDB, BlueStripe, AiScaler, Aerospike, New Relic, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

• Apple is hiring for multiple positions. Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly.
  • Quality Assurance Engineer. The iOS Systems team is looking for a Quality Assurance engineer. In this role you will be expected to work hand-in-hand with the software engineering team to find and diagnose software defects. Please apply here.
  • Sr Software Engineer iPhone. Do you love building highly scalable, distributed web applications? Does the idea of a fast-paced environment make your heart leap? Do you want your technical abilities to be challenged every day, and for your work to make a difference in the lives of millions of people? Please apply here.
  • Sr Software Engineer. The iOS Systems Team is looking for a Software Engineer to work on operations, tools development and support of worldwide iOS Device sales and activations. Please apply here. 


• We need awesome people @ Booking.com - We want YOU! Come design next
  generation interfaces, solve critical scalability problems, and hack on one of the largest Perl codebases. Apply: http://www.booking.com/jobs.en-us.html


• Spokeo is hiring a Senior Backend Developer. We've spent years agonizing over the best way to construct an elegant, simplistic, yet highly powerful people search engine. Spokeo deals with problems of ginormous scale, so a strong understanding and appreciation for algorithms and efficiency is desired. Please apply here.


• Spokeo is hiring a Senior Software Developer - Web Applications. Build features that involve any of our products, from the universal people search interface and functionality to the construction of family trees to a portal that connects customers to employees and employer data. Please apply here.


• UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, is looking for a passionate UI Engineer to design, architect, and develop our their user interface using the latest web and mobile technologies. Make the impossible possible and the hard easy. Apply here.


• Software Engineer - Infrastructure & Big Data – AppDynamics, leader in next generation solutions for managing modern, distributed, and extremely complex applications residing in both the cloud and the data center, is looking for a Software Engineers (All-Levels) to design and develop scalable software written in Java and MySQL for backend component of software that manages application architectures. Apply here.


• New Relic is looking for a Java Instrumentation Engineer, Java Scalability Engineer,  Distributed Systems Engineer and Android app engineer in Portland, OR. Ready to scale a web service with more incoming bits/second than Twitter? 

Fun and Informative Events

• Your amazing event here.

Cool Products and Services

• LogicMonitor is the cloud-based IT performance monitoring solution that enables companies to easily and cost-effectively monitor their entire IT infrastructure stack – storage, servers, networks, applications, virtualization, and websites – from the cloud. No firewall changes needed - start monitoring in only 15 minutes utilizing customized dashboards, trending graphs & alerting


• NuoDB Blackbirds Release 2.0 Birthday. They grow up so fast these days! What people love about NuoDB is that it’s stable, always there for you and its flexible. Which is why it’s winning all kinds of popularity competitions, from “Most Likely to Succeed” through “Least Likely To Fall Over Sharding” to “Most Likely to Be ACID Compliant”. 


• Rapidly Develop Hadoop MapReduce Code. With ScaleOut hServer™ you can use a subset of your Hadoop data and run your MapReduce code in seconds for fast code development and you don’t need to load and manage the Hadoop software  stack, it's a self-contained Hadoop MapReduce execution environment. To learn more check out www.scaleoutsoftware.com/prototypehadoop/. 


• MongoDB Backup Free Usage Tier Announced. We're pleased to introduce the free usage tier to MongoDB Management Service (MMS). MMS Backup provides point-in-time recovery for replica sets and consistent snapshots for sharded systems with minimal performance impact. Start backing up today at mms.mongodb.com.


• BlueStripe FactFinder Express is the ultimate tool for server monitoring and solving performance problems. Monitor URL response times and see if the problem is the application, a back-end call, a disk, or OS resources.


• Aerospike Capacity Planning Kit. Download the Capacity Planning Kit to determine your database storage capacity and node requirements. The kit includes a step-by-step Capacity Planning Guide and a Planning worksheet. Free download.


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Cloud deployable. Free instant trial, no sign-up required.  http://aiscaler.com/


• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.


• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

If any of these items interest you there's a full description of each sponsor below. Please click to read more...

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In Memory: Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!

This is an article published last year, but as today is Grace Hopper's birthday I thought it would be a good time to share again an amazing talk from this amazing woman.

Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler, searched for a concrete way to create an intuitive understanding of just how fast is a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, which was the speed of their new computer circuits. As an illustration she settled on the length of wire that is as long as light can travel in one nanosecond. The length is a very portable 11.8 inches. A microseconds worth of wire is a still portable, but a much bulkier 984 feet. In one millisecond light travels 186 miles, which only Hercules could carry. In today's terms, at a 3.06 GHz clock speed, there's .33 nanoseconds between ticks, or 3.73 inches of light travel.

Understanding the profligate ways of programmers, she suggests that every programmer wear a necklace of a microseconds worth of wire so they know what they are wasting when they throw away microseconds. And if a General is busting your chops about satellite messages taking too long to send, you can bust out your piece of wire and explain there's a lot of nanoseconds between here and there.

Here's a short, witty, and wise video of her famous nanosecond demonstration. An amazing lady, great innovator, an engaging speaker, and an inspiring teacher.

Related Articles

• A snippet of a 60 Minutes interview with her Grace. Unfortunately the full interview is no longer available. Thank you copyright.
• Creative Quotations from Grace Hopper 
• Grace Hopper on Letterman

Site Moves from PHP to Facebook's HipHop, Now Pages Load in .6 Seconds Instead of Five

If you code in PHP have you ever wondered about moving to Facebook's HipHop JIT Virtual Machine for PHP? With HipHop Facebook achieved over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption compared to Zend PHP 5.2 engine + APC.

But will HipHop really work for you? Is it really drop-in compatible? Is it really as fast as they say?

To answer questions like this nothing beats a good experience report and here's a great one: Adventures in Configuring and Running Facebook's HipHopVM (hhvm) JIT Compiler for PHP by Yermo Lamers.

Yermo selected PHP to implement a number of content web sites. He took an interesting approach, he created a forms, views, validation, and business logic description language to remove the drudgery of creating the same code over and over again for each page. Having done this in Perl I think it's a great a approach. The problem is it can be slow. PHP's slow string handling makes dynamically evaluating a description template for each page very slow. Up to 5 seconds.

Rather than rewrite in C++ Yermo tried HipHop. The results were impressive:

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 6th, 2013

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out.

• 72: Intel's 72 core x86 Processor; One Trillion: number of fonts served by Google.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • West-Eberhard: The gene does not lead, it follows.
  • @waldojaquith: To an ant, gravity is nothing, but surface tension is a powerful force. When you change scale, you play by different rules.
  • Nicholas Christakis: The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas. We assemble ourselves into networks to facilitate the flow information but we pay a price, the spread of disease.
  • James Mickens: When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble.
  • Joe McMahon: The average small startup in Silicon Valley today – 20 or so people –  is carrying about the equivalent power of all the PDP-11′s sold during the 1970′s in their pockets and purses.
  • Ilya Grigorik:  Wow... amazon.com is completely disregarding the initial TCP congestion window
  • Twitter: Every problem is a scaling problem. 
• And so it begins. Google has opened Google Compute Engine to the masses. You can look at this by comparing features, cost, performance, etc. You can compare by ecosystem. You can compare by who is most likely to eat their young. But what is clear: developers will now be comparing.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...

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