In Zen And The Art Of Scaling – A Koan And Epigram Approach, Russell Sullivan offered an interesting conjecture: there are 20 classic bottlenecks. This sounds suspiciously like the idea that there only 20 basic story plots. And depending on how you ch…

The adding jitter strategy was one of the most commented on techniques from 7 Years Of YouTube Scalability Lessons In 30 Minutes on HackerNews. Probably because it’s one of the emergent phenomena that you really can’t predict and is shocki…

The fascination over Instagram continues and fortunately we have several new streams of information to feed the insanity. So consider this article an update to The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought For A Cool Billion Dollars, based primarily on S…

It’s HighScalability Time:

50 million in 50 days : Draw Something downloads; 40 million concurrent users : Skype
Key to making sensors ubiquitous is getting the BOM cost down. Here’s a dream way of making that happen: Bye-Bye Batteries: Radio Wa…

It’s been a well kept secret, but you may have heard Facebook will Buy Photo-Sharing Service Instagram for $1 Billion. Just what is Facebook buying? Here’s a quick gloss I did a little over a year ago on a presentation Instagram gave on…

This is a guest post by Matt Abrams (@abramsm), from Clearspring, discussing how they are able to accurately estimate the cardinality of sets with billions of distinct elements using surprisingly small data structures. Their servers receive well over…

As it is said in the recent article “Google: Taming the Long Latency Tail – When More Machines Equals Worse Results” , latency variability has greater impact in larger scale clusters where a typical request is composed of multiple distributed/para…

Erick Pickup, lead developer at YouPorn.com, presented their architecture in a talk titled Building a Website To Scale given at the ConFoo conference.  As you might expect, YouPorn is a beast, streaming three full DVDs of video every second, hand…

Martin Thompson wrote a really interesting article on the beneficial performance impact of taking advantage of Processor Affinity:

The interesting thing I’ve observed is that the unpinned test will follow a step function of unpredictable perform…

Edd Dumbill wrote an interesting article on O’Reilly Radar covering the current solutions for running Big Data in the Cloud
Big data and cloud technology go hand-in-hand. Big data needs clusters of servers for processing, which clouds c…