That is all. (Ok, so I realize some of you will need some more information. Brad Fitzpatrick, with Danga and now SixApart, is pretty amazing when it comes to the software he’s developed and released to the public. These range from utilities to provide secure backups on hardware you don’t own (brackup) distributed job schedulers (The Schwartz) and others I’ve written about. Note for you Perl-bashers that he did much of this in Perl.)
Tag: livejournal
Building Scalable Systems
After getting very, very frustrated with MySQL replication (and seeing the hoops people have to hop through to get replication to scale), I’ve decided I’m not that interested in pursuing designs that put a database at the center of the universe. Reading through Tim O’Reilly’s database war stories helped cement this idea for me. Especially interesting was the bloglines and memorandum interview and the facinating topix.net architecture (found from a comment). Another datapoint is LiveJournal. LiveJournal uses MySQL for storing posts, but they’ve a lot of work to minimize the use of MySQL as they’ve grown. We hear a lot about Google’s BigTable and GoogleFS all the time. But we can’t use them because the source isn’t available. LiveJournal has written similar systems in MogileFS and memcached and, unlike Google’s work, these are available to everyone. I’m going to start looking at how I can build systems around these two utilities and to minimize or eliminate my dependence on a SQL server.
lj + Akismet
After putting Akismet in last night, I woke up this morning to find that 40 comments had been blocked. Yay, Akismet! Still, a few got through, and I wanted to submit those back to Akismet. A few lines of code and all is done. Who said other people’s Perl was hard to read? code