Archive for the 'architecture' Category

AWS is down: Why the sky is falling – justinsb’s posterous

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

A blog post explaining nature of the current Amazon AWS outage. The deal is that several so-called availability zones (AZ) failed simultaneously in amazon US-EAST region, even though amazon’s FAQ describe such event to be unlikely. Many interestin…

Real-World Web Application Benchmarking | Facebook

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Facebook has build custom web-app testing framework to test server performance. Read it, especially the section on why “standard” SPECxxx benchmarks are not a good measure of anything. Also, ready about performance-per-watt, as this is really import…

Understanding the StackOverflow Database Schema – SQLServerPedia

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Notes about schema used by StackOverflow.com and related websites. It is very simple, only several tables used. (most likely because there are performance problems with joins)

Ultra-Large-Scale-Sites / Walter Kriha, Scalability and Availability Aspects [application/pdf]

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

a draft of the book “Scalability and Availability Aspects” by Walter Kriha. Many up-to-date info on theory and practice of building scalable high-loaded web/internet systems

copilot_spec.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Example specs from Joel / copilot /

Skype – The Big Blog – CIO update: Post-mortem on the Skype outage

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

detailed notes about skype outage on DEC-23/24 2010

[rus] Vktontante.ru architecture | Архитектура Вконтакте | Insight IT

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

[ENG] http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.insight-it.ru%2Fmasshtabiruemost%2Farkhitektura-vkontakte%2F&sl=ru&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
some info about internals of vkontakte.ru – russian facebook clone, most popular soci…

Robert Haas: MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, Part 1: Table Organization

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

An article from a well-known PostgreSQL developer comparing MySQL InnoDB and PostgreSQL table structures

dga: Notes from Google "Flash" talk at UCSD non-volatile memories workshop

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

a lot of interesting details about using flash drives as cache and high-perf block io devices (notes from google talk given at UCSD)

Harald Welte’s blog — Paper: Anatomy of contemporary GSM cellphones

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

An excellent [attempt of ] description of the GSM cell phones hardware, design, architecture and implementation