BBC Digital Media Distribution: How we improved throughput by 4x
Replacing varnish with nginx. Nice deep-dive blog post covering kernel innards
The Importance of Tuning Your Thread Pools
Excellent blog post on thread pools, backpressure, Little’s Law, and other Hystrix-related topics (PS: use Hystrix)
(tags: hystrix threadpools concurrency java jvm backpressure littles-law capacity)
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good explanation of this new data structure for searching multidimensional data
(tags: search lucene bkd-trees searching data-structures)
The Guinness Brewer Who Revolutionized Statistics
William S. Gosset, discoverer of the Student’s T-Test. Amazon should have taken note of this trick:
Upon completing his work on the t-distribution, Gosset was eager to make his work public. It was an important finding, and one he wanted to share with the wider world. The managers of Guinness were not so keen on this. They realized they had an advantage over the competition by using this method, and were not excited about relinquishing that leg up. If Gosset were to publish the paper, other breweries would be on to them. So they came to a compromise. Guinness agreed to allow Gosset to publish the finding, as long as he used a pseudonym. This way, competitors would not be able to realize that someone on Guinness’s payroll was doing such research, and figure out that the company’s scientifically enlightened approach was key to their success.
(tags: statistics william-gosset history guinness brewing t-test pseudonyms dublin)
How open-source software developers helped end the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone
Little known to the rest of the world, a team of open source software developers played a small but integral part in helping to stop the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone, solving a payroll crisis that was hindering the fight against the disease. Emerson Tan from NetHope, a consortium of NGOs working in IT and development, told the tale at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. “These guys basically saved their country from complete collapse. I can’t overestimate how many lives they saved,” he said about his co-presenters, Salton Arthur Massally, Harold Valentine Mac-Saidu and Francis Banguara, who appeared over video link.
(tags: open-source software coding payroll sierra-leone ebola ccc)
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A good review of RethinkDB! Hopefully not just because this test is contract work on behalf of the RethinkDB team ;)
I’ve run hundreds of test against RethinkDB at majority/majority, at various timescales, request rates, concurrencies, and with different types of failures. Consistent with the documentation, I have never found a linearization failure with these settings. If you use hard durability, majority writes, and majority reads, single-document ops in RethinkDB appear safe.
(tags: rethinkdb databases stores storage ops availability cap jepsen tests replication)