Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011) by sidlls on Sunday April 09, 2017 @11:49AM (#14072834)

You're omitting a lot of details. The number of users isn't as important, for example, as the number of users simultaneously using services and which services they were using concurrently. Also, no offense here, but the way you describe your experience makes it seem like you were very inexperienced in general. Your "not noticing" services that failed could mean, for example, that you weren't measuring properly and probably never learned to. In which case your anecdote isn't necessarily a useful one.

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Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011) by timewarrior on Sunday April 09, 2017 @12:23PM (#14072990)

It might be a good idea to read my post again. When I talk about 'service which failed' it was other products (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc) - not components of my product.

My post says 50M+ users and 1B+ message on a day. Almost 50% daily active users. And this was early 2000 hardware. Last year WhatsApp was doing 60 billion messages per day (60x of what we did).

However our messages had a lot more logic, because we delivered on unreliable Telco texting pipes. Pipes had a set throughput. Some pipes delivered to just some geographies. They would randomly fail downstream so you had to do health monitoring and management. Some pipes cost per message and some cost based on throughput. So pick in real time for the lowest cost. Different messages had different priority. In summary - there was a lot more business logic per message sent.

I was of course very inexperienced when I started. I was just two years out of college. However in the end the product was 50+ services running on 200+ servers. This experience helped me scale user communication infra at Dropbox to 100x scale within 3 months.

Your message was flame-bait at best and didn't seem to contribute to the discussion. You were passing judgements based on incomplete information. You could have asked nicely and still gotten a response.

Edit: fixed typo

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Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011) by sidlls on Sunday April 09, 2017 @12:52PM (#14073153)

> It might be a good idea to read my post again. When I talk about 'service which failed' it was other products (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc) - not components of my product.

This wasn't clear at all from your comment.

> Your message was flame-bait at best and didn't seem to contribute to the discussion. You were passing judgements based on incomplete information. You could have asked nicely and still gotten a response.

My message was not flame bait; that's your interpretation. I'm sorry you took offense, but please do consider that your original comment does omit lots of important details, as you apparently (should) know from your experience at Dropbox.

Also, per your quoted numbers WhatsApp was going 60x what your app was, not 1/60. Typo?

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