__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 09 March 2007 12:58 \__
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ John Bailo ] on Thursday 08 March 2007 18:04 \__
>>
>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>> Inside Second Life's Data Centers
>>>>
>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>> | Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location
>>>> | facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment
>>>> | to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL
>>>> | database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is
>>>> | suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden
>>>> | Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka.
>>>
>>> The thing I really like about them is they released their client for
>>> Linux as well and it performs better on Linux than the Windopes platform.
>>
>> They are having scaling issues though. The other day I read about the
>> additions of like a hundred boxes every week (this thing grows
>> exponentially and so do the inter-person dependencies... just like
>> Digg.com actually). They'll have to do some rethinking. It's not
>> necessarily MySQL that's to blame, but maybe flawed ideas in
>> design/implementation. For instance, In Netscape we boast pageload speed.
>> With Digg, on the other hand, if you have many people flagged as 'friend',
>> a pageload can take over 10 second (broadband). The database goes nuts
>> because of implementation (number of queries), so it's not a
>> MySQL-specific issue. Both sites use LAMP, but when you start with a small
>> site you want many features that would just scale poorly in the long term.
>> And dropping nice features is hard because people come to expect and love
>> them. That's the whole /social/ (interconnectivity) aspect. Caching rarely
>> works because everything is moving very /fast/. There are/were times when
>> requests got rejected because of server loads that went through the
>> ceiling. In fact, when people with many friends navigate through Digg
>> (with many tabs opening simultaneously), we must cost them a lot of money
>> (server capacity=electricity). Maybe 10 times that of an new user.
>>
>> 'Nuff rambling... ;-)
>>
>
> In the end, there is no solution for this other than hierarchies. It's
> referred to as the n² problem in telcos (n^2 or n-squared, an is also
> well recognised as an analogous problem in computing algorithms, too.
> The problem the computing world is now facing is that the n² problem
> extends /outside/ the machine, as well as inside it. In telco networks,
> you get around it by building trunking hierarchies, thus reducing the
> number of interfaces an individual node can have. In social networks,
> the solution could well be similar if you build hierarchies where you
> have separate naming, addressing and routeing across your virtual space,
> so that you can use the addressing and routeing information to reduce
> the number of direction connections.
>
> It's quite scary how few truly new problems there are in engineering...
In the case of Digg, imagine yourself opening an item with 100 comments and
then checking a list of 600 people, matching each of these to each one of
the comments. The devs just know that it's server murder when we open pages
(I'm not alone in this). Some friends of mine who are in a similar situation
simply use the site while logged off, or stop using it altogether when they
are excessively interconnected to other 'nodes' in the graph (registerted
members). However, since social aspects are the key attraction, this is hard
to give up. The delay is otherwise intolerable. Tabs and virtual desktops
are the only thing which makes the need for patience go away, but it still
changes workflow. Games like Warcraft (I was a huge fan of 1 and 2) didn't
have these issues, but there was a lot to keep track of, which was out of
sight. Same program in RPGs and FPSs, but display is not an issue. Also, the
server (host) can take a large lump of the load off the clients.
--
~~ Best wishes
Surely, Microsoft has given up on altruism in the IT industry
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
roy pts/1 Fri Mar 9 09:55 - 09:56 (00:00)
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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