Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Yesterday in history: Nikola Tesla's Birthday, born in 1856. The greatest geek who ever lived?

• 10Gbps: New world record broadband speed of 10 Gbps over copper.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @BenedictEvans: There were 40m internet users when Netscape IPOed. The time's not far off when a startup with 40m users will be too small to get funded.
  • Scott Aaronson: In any case, the question I asked myself about CLEVER/PageRank was not the one that, maybe in retrospect, I should have asked: namely, “how can I leverage the fact that I know the importance of this idea before most people do, in order to make millions of dollars?”
  • chub79: µservices aren't technological as much as they are cultural.
  • @Elmood: I thought of a new term when talking about code: "It's made from unmaintainium."
  • @lxt: Amazing how quickly a bunch of nines go up in smoke.
  • @martinrue: Knock knock. Race condition. Who's there?


• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu: History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system. History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again.


• Tim Freeman indulges a well developed Technothantos Complex and comes up with a great big list of outage postmortems. You'll find the usual, outages from configuration issues, failover failures, quorumnesia, protocol flapping, bugs in not your stuff that causes bugs in your stuff, power outages, capacity problems, JPOBs (just plain old bugs), DDOS attacks, and good old operator error. 


• Pinterest describes PinLater, An asynchronous job execution system. PinLater executes hundreds of different job types at a processing rate of over 100,000 per second. So you may say yet another async job system, but it's clear keeping such a critical part of their infrastructure in house makes sense. The article is a good explanation of a fairly standard approach. It used Thrift for the API, it's written in Java, Twitter’s Finagle is used for the RPC framework. MySQL is "used for relatively low throughput use cases and those that schedule jobs over long periods and thus can benefit from storing jobs on disk rather than purely in memory." Redis is "used for high throughput job queues that are normally drained in real time." Horizontal scaling is via sharding. 


• In science class we did this one day, but I just couldn't do it. Dissecting Message Queues. Tyler Treat looks at both brokerless and brokered queues by looking a throughput benchmarks, latency benchmarks, and through qualitative analysis. No winner was declared, but if you are making a choice in this area it's well worth reading. 


• 40 Million hits a day on WordPress using a $10 VPS. Sure, it's a static site, but still a good example of what can be done these days. Stack: Nginx + PHP-FPM (aka LEMP Stack) + Microcaching. 

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