How I Unexpectedly Found Myself Doing IA Consulting For Startups (this is a post on my "professional" site. I haven't been able to figure out when to post here or there, any tips on that?).
- It's a runtime for Ruby, C# and Javascript, which means you can just put your js code straight into Silverlight and it will work the same, just much faster. Could be good for js-intensive apps.
How often does the CEO of a startup fire himself? "Spending 6+ more months in development before re-entering the market is
not what I want to be doing, and as the single most expensive employee
in the company it really doesn’t make much sense to be paying me when 2
additional engineers would do the company far more in the way of value
creation."
ok, too much silverlight hype for moi. This fox movie page: "Twentieth Century Fox and Microsoft® Silverlight™ bring a thrilling
video experience right to your web browser with this interactive player
and upcoming movie trailers. (Broadband connection recommended)." When really, it's worse than Youtube. Even old stodgy Apple trailer page is better than this.
Silverlight does install fast, but I can't get any of the demos to work. It doesn't work with FF?
- The site was tested in Perl and mysql, launched in ColdFusion (!) and Microsoft SQL.
- Friendster started having problems in 2003 (30 sec loadtimes), when Myspace launched. Good timing.
- The network effects (users inviting other users) started to kick in about 8 months after launch (and never stopped).
- Every profile page displays data from multiple users, hence multiple db lookups need to be used and you can't cache too easily.
- 5 major architecture revisions.
- When they hit 100,000s of users in 2004 and then millions of users in 2005, lots of re-architecting was needed.
- Since 7 million users in early 2005, the architecture has been roughly the same.
- At 500,000 users (early 2004), the single db couldn't handle the load anymore. That sounds about right.
- They did vertical partioning (different databases for different parts of the site), but that never lasts long. Flickr uses horizontal partioning, much better.
- After the vertical partioning, they didn't want to do all the code rewriting involved in horizontal partitioning, and decided to just get more expensive database servers. But they ended up being way too expensive for the power you get.
- Finally, they started to chunck their tables in chuncks of 1 million users.
- There was still a single database that contains the user name and password credentials for all users.
- We are early 2005 so far.
- They switched from Coldfusion to asp.net
- Their architecture meant that some servers where very busy and others not. 2 people full-time redistributed data between servers.
- Spring 2005: 17 million accounts. They added caching (way too late).
(via) Inside Myspace: how they got big while doing *all* the wrong things. The "css" feature was a mistake, because they didn't know about xss. And so on.
I think someone will write one of these days the untold story of Myspace's growth. And yes, before the viral stuff kicked in, marketing had a lot to do with it it seems.
Amazon S3 is getting even cheaper! From an email to their developers:
"Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available on the Amazon S3 detail page):
Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB - uploaded
$0.20 / GB - downloaded
New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge
New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests"
I've only worked twice with companies using .NET for web interfaces, and in both cases the UI was a disaster and the usability problems guaranteed lots of consulting hours.. Why is that? Or was that a fluke? (2 cases is hardly proof of anything) I know it's possible to make usable and elegant web UI with any technology, but does .NET somehow encourage bad UI?
1-page websites
I realized today that the apps I use everyday are all 1-page websites. Gmail. Bloglines. Google search. Actually, Google is the king of the 1-page websites - almost all their products consist of only 1 page.
Twitter is 1-page, because there is 1 page that you spend 90% of your time on. Flickr is multipage, although it's main function (watch photos) is 1-page. Digg is 1 page. Mmm...
But what bothers me about these immersive worlds (isn't there a better name?) is that they're all supercommercial. Why would that be?
Damn, these "immersive worlds" in the browser are popular.
You know this problem in IA when you design sites without real content, and before you know it there are loads of excerpts all over the page that don't really mean anything, ending in 3 dots "..."? It leads to a homepage like this one for example, just lots of excerpted content that doesn't really do much for anyone.
I got a word for that. Excerptitis. Maybe you have a better one?
Comments work :) It's been a while!
Ah, I messed up the site, but now it works again, and THE COMMENTS WORK! (excuse the all-caps)
The comments work! Yey!
April was not only the hottest, the dryest and the warmest April ever in Belgium, but most likely (if there's no rain tomorrow) it will also be the first month every without any rain at all.
So far so good, life in Belgium :) The weather has been incredible.
A bunch of presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more.
(I changed the title because "top 10" posts are indeed sucky. Also: looking for my colombia travel site?)
By the way, here's the RSS feed of my blog, in case you'd like to subscribe.
I always love to read scaling discussions, especially about popular web apps, and there are loads of them out there. Here's my overview of the best. By the way, the best book on scaling apps I've ever read is Building Scalable Websites, by Cal Henderson (the Flickr guy).
It's dog-eared on my desk, and taught me about sharding (which I used extensively for mefeedia). Sharding is when you cut a really big table into pieces, so you can put those on separate servers. It means you have to make changes to your code, and your database isn't so database-y anymore, but it works. For example, online games use sharding to grow their virtual worlds, because there's no way they could serve all that information from 1 db cluster.
Scaling Twitter with Ruby.
Twitter is hot today, and they ran into some serious scaling problems, although the app itself is quite simple. It consists of messages of maximum 140 characters. Lessons are the same as most apps: Memcache like crazy, and optimize the database (the biggest bottleneck most of the time).
Also, Ruby on Rails scales pretty much the same way as PHP and other similar languages: shared nothing architecture. Shared nothing means that there is no 1 thing that is shared by all servers, since that would become a bottleneck.
PHP, for example, has shared nothing architecture out of the box, except perhaps for sessions, but that's easily solved by storing sessions in a db (which then has it's own scaling approach) and not in the filesystem. Here's a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf that explain scaling with PHP5. (Here's the mp3 audio recorded by Niall Kennedy).
Blain Cook made this presentation:
Scaling Flickr.
Cal Henderson wrote the above book, and also has a good presentation: Scaling Flickr slides as PDF's.
One of the problems you get into when scaling something like Flickr where you store LOTS of stuff, is that you can't just store that on a harddrive anymore: it's not big enough. Apart from just using Amazon's S3 service (which rocks - I used it for mefeedia and I know lots of startups who use it), there are other solutions. A good presentation of that by Cal is this one:
Cal (he's a busy dude) also made this presenation about scaling web apps, generally:
John Allspaw (flickr plumbr) also has a good presentation about scaling Flickr:
Scaling LiveJournal.
LiveJournal was one of the first social networks, before that word meant anything, and they've partly invented how to scale standard php/mysql/apache apps. They developed memcached, which is now used by almost anyone who wants to scale their site.
Brad Fitzpatrick has a good set of slides on how they evolved the service, here's a PDF version. And here's the slideshow embedded:
Kevin Rose mentioned this was "the bible for scaling Digg" - and I think quite a few other web apps are based on this.
Six Apart.
The livejournal guys with all their scaling expertise were acquired by Six Apart, and they soon launched Vox. And of course, here's a presentation on making Vox scalable:
Bloglines.
Bloglines' scaling problems where slightly different from your average web app, since they are an aggregator of feeds. That means they have billions of blogposts they have to keep and serve to users, and that creates its own scaling problems. The Bloglines approach was to, instead of using a database, just store all that stuff in a special filesystem. Today it'd be easier to do this since there are a few filesystems that do that, or you could just go with S3 again. Mark Fletcher (who also sold Onelist to Yahoo which is now Yahoo Groups) has given a few talks on scaling Onelist and Bloglines: here's the mp3 audio version, and here's the PDF of that talk. And a text transcript.
Last.fm
Last.fm is one of the aggregation-type apps: they gather a lot of data about what music you listen to. Similarly to Bloglines, that causes it's own scaling problems:
Slideshare.
All the slides in this post are hosted by Slideshare, an incredible service by my fellow information architect Rashmi Sinha and team. When I found out about the project, I emailed her: "brilliant and so obvious once you think of it". Like many startups, they use S3 to serve their content, and they have the obligatory yet interesting slides to explain how:
I haven't linked to lots of good thinking about scaling, or to technical resources and stuff. But the presentations should get you going in the world of memcached, perlbal, nothing shared and federation :) Enjoy!
PS: See also How I Unexpectedly Found Myself Doing Consulting For Startups (this is a post on my "professional" site. I haven't been able to figure out when to post here or there, any tips on that?).
Update: more presentations.
Another great talk in video this time, from the MySQL Bay Area Community Meetup, May 2007:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa1guca-gFQ]
Finally, Dan Pritchett has a good presentation on scaling eBay (PDF). 26 Billion SQL queries per day! 300+ new features per quarter! 4 architecture versions since 1998 and some pretty crazy scaling of the search.
New: presentation on how Facebook uses PHP APC cache (PDF).
A talk on Youtube scalability: "In the summer of 2006, they grew from 30 million pages per day to 100 million pages per day, in a 4 month period. Thumbnails turn out to be surprisingly hard to serve efficiently. (I ran into this with mefeedia too, luckily Amazon S3 came to the rescue by then.)" Youtube uses Python, Apache, MySQL, Memcached.
NEW: Front end scaling is important too, and often ignored. Here's a good presentation from the Yahoo guys:
- 10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
- four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
- four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
- one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
- two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
- two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
- 18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
- 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
- five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
- 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.
Google investing 250 million Euro in a huge Belgian data center.
In the continuing saga of illegible domain names, I've recently purchased wayut.com and xofy.net. Once you know what they are they're actually easy to remember. 2 possible upcoming projects. Wanna guess?
What's wrong with the workhack todo list: it dissapears todo items that are done. I like to see what I've accomplished, to get that feeling of satisfaction, of knowing you've done at least *something* the past 2 days.
you have better odds of winning $5M in the NY
Lottery than you do of selling your company to Google (or Yahoo) - in 2005
Seems that prices for good developers in Bangalore are skyrocketing. That's a good thing.
Om: But there was a lesson learned: never be the me-too player in your business category.
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Information_Architecture_and_Ethical_Design.mp3
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Real_Information_Architecture_New_Mighty_Deeds.mp3
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Using_Search_Analytics_to_Diagnose_Whats_Ailing_your_Information_Architecture.mp3
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/ProjectTouchstones-JessMcMullin.mp3
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Systems_Thinking_Rich_Mapping_and_Conceptual_Models.mp3
http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Information_Architecture_and_Ethical_Design.mp3 I'm posting these links so they show up in my feed and I can hence get them easily in iTunes.
This is a video of how RSS works, in rather plain English.
A good explanation of the problem with databases. Read and write from memory is much faster. Things are changing in db land - where did I read that mysql will now have a tabletype that's basically an rss feed?
Actually a good post on creating a killer team for a startup.
http://startupideatr.com: startup ideas. Ideas really are almost 100% worthless :)
I hear mefeedia is doing great, numbers continue to grow fast. It's very satisfying to see that the people I sold it to are continuing to build it out in the original spirit.
Here's an interesting seminar title (via Jon Udell): How to Read 100 Million Blogs (and How to Classify Deaths without Physicians)
The web globalization report card 2007: "Among the many trends we noticed: The average number of languages supported by the 200 sites has increased to 18, up from 15 last year.
And the average number of languages supported by the top 20 Web sites
was 45. It used to be you could support 10 languages and pretty much
stand apart from the pack. Not any more."
mm, I upgraded my wordpress but comments still don't work. Any tips?
Wow - shooting victim on youtube. Reporting really has changed. For better and for worse, at the same time.
Lots of great links about the architecture of conversation.
And I'm still doing good for the search terms how to make a documentary.
Rails flash in php
A friend told me about Rail's flash concept which makes it very easy to provide "success" messages and such after submitting a form.
This is some quick code that does something like that (assuming you have a session running) in PHP: (really just a test of posting code)
/**
* This class lets you set variables that are kept for 1 session pageload, then destroyed (hence the "Flash"), which on the next pageload get reflected in a template (for example).
* For use with submitting forms and returning an error message, for example.
*/
class sessionFlashBucket
{
/**
* write a new variable to FlashBucket with a value
*/
function write($var, $val)
{
// put this var in the users _SESSION
$_SESSION[$var] = $val;
return TRUE;
}
/**
* read and empty variable from FlashBucket ('message' by default)
*/
function read($var = "message")
{
// get variable from session
$result = $_SESSION[$var];
// delete variable from FlashBucket
unset($_SESSION[$var]);
return $result;
}
}
Kiva lets you loan money (200, 500$) to a specific entrepreneur in a developing country with a specific plan. 100% of the loan goes to the entrepreneur.
As for, "will I get my money back?":
"Your Kiva.org loan is a low-risk loan. Microfinance loans
worldwide are generating repayment rates of 97%.
To date, Kiva.org’s repayment rate is 100%."
I just realized, the web/internet is becoming varied enough for it to become diverse. In the beginning, we all went to the same websites (Yahoo) and used the same services (email). Now, certain groups may use blogs and feedreaders, others may use Myspace and IM, and they never have to meet. And the functionality on the next will probably become more and more varied, so that there will be more space for different groups of people using different types of services.
I was trying to find good, free (and legal) music on jamendo but no such luck. Any other tips on where to look? The free music movement should be far enough along by now that I can go somewhere and find some good stuff without having to be a 16 year old geek?