In 2001 when I was 14, I had no idea what scalability was or how anyone scaled websites. I ran a site with 20k users on a single sever with a single Pentium IV (1.4? Ghz) processor from a garage with no climate control and the fastest cable connection I could afford. At peak hours the processor finally succumbed to the load and I had to buy a second server. I was able to talk a local ISP into co-locating the servers in their rack (Climate control! Fiber!). When I realized that I could load balance with DNS and no load balancing software, I thought I was a genius. The king of scalability.<p>Needless to say, I was not the king. The engineers at Facebook are king.
Hi All! Thanks for the comments here. The video for this same (more recent) talk at SRECon Europe 2015 is up and it is much higher quality. I have iterated on the presentation with feedback I got since giving this in February. Enjoy!<p>Usenix:
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon15europe/program/presentation/shuff" rel="nofollow">https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon15europe/program/pre...</a><p>Direct MP4:
<a href="http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f.r43.cf2.rackcdn.com/srecon15europe/shuff.mp4" rel="nofollow">http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f...</a>
Quite an interesting talk. I liked the format: "How to get more rps?..."<p>It's humbling to think of the scale that some other folks deal with. I'm concerned of 2x growth with running a couple thousand sites on a dozen servers.<p>You can't just hit up SO when you run into a problem at Facebook's scale.
Not trying to be a wet blanket, but there's nothing really groundbreaking in this talk. It's pretty basic stuff that everyone else running L3 networks already does.<p>I'd be much more interested in a talk that is solely on proxygen.<p>I'd also like to know their fragmentation rate is between the L4 and L7 LB's. I know what ours is, but I'm sure FB takes a lot more large uploads than we do. Fragmentation is the downside to using IPVS in a L3 network.
Well, he kinda failed the infamous Facebook interview question of "what happens when you type www.facebook.com and hit enter in a browser?" ;)