Quite an interesting talk. I liked the format: "How to get more rps?..."
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.
You can't just hit up SO when you run into a problem at Facebook's scale.
We didn't get serious about load balancing and create a team dedicated to it until fall of 2011. At the time, Facebook had 800 million active users per month. We had run out of runway on commercial and open source options, and needed a lot more flexibility with how we allocated and moved traffic around. It took a lot of effort to get to where we are today, but the thing I'll tell you is that these huge systems always start with a prototype running on a dev server. And then you get it to run traffic for your whole team, and then the whole company. Then you try it in a cluster, a datacenter, a region, and all of a sudden you've built a load balancer.
It took Proxygen less than 18 months to go from inception at a hackathon to running all of Facebook's production HTTP traffic. And we could have shaved that by a few months if we had made smarter decisions along the way.
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.
You can't just hit up SO when you run into a problem at Facebook's scale.