Snax - scaling Rails

up and running with cassandra

March 1, 2010
By Evan Weaver at Snax
up and running with cassandra

Cassandra is a hybrid non-relational database in the same class as Google's BigTable. It is more featureful than a key/value store like Dynomite, but supports fewer query types than a document store like MongoDB.Cassandra was started by Facebo...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

object allocations on the web

October 22, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
object allocations on the web

How many objects does a Rails request allocate? Here are Twitter's numbers:API: 22,700 objects per request Website: 67,500 objects per request Daemons: 27,900 objects per actionI want them to be lower. Overall, we burn 20% of our front-end ...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

scribe client

September 30, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
scribe client

I've released Scribe 0.1, a Ruby client for the Scribe remote log server. sudo gem install scribe Usage is simple:client = Scribe.new client.log("I'm lonely in a crowded room.", "Rails")Documentation is here. about scrib...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

ree

September 24, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
ree

We recently migrated Twitter from a custom Ruby 1.8.6 build to a Ruby Enterprise Edition release candidate, courtesy of Phusion. Our primary motivation was the integration of Brent's MBARI patches, which increase memory stability. Some features ...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

memcached gem release

August 4, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
memcached gem release

One of the hardest gems to install is no more. It's now easy to install! Memcached 0.15 features:Update to libmemcached 0.31.1 Bundle libmemcached itself with the gem (antifuchs) UDP connection support Unix domain socket support (hellvinz) AUT...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

distributed systems primer

May 4, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
distributed systems primer

I've been reading a bunch of papers about distributed systems recently, in order to help systematize for myself the thing that we built over the last year. Many of them were originally passed to me by Toby DiPasquale. Here is an annotated list s...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

peeping into memcached

April 20, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
peeping into memcached

Memcached is generally treated as a black box. But what if you really need to know what's in there? Not for runtime purposes, but for optimization and capacity planning? demo$ sudo peep --pretty 2479time | exptime | nbytes | clsid | ...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

ruby gc tuning

April 10, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
ruby gc tuning

I'd like to call out something important from my QCon slides: the Railsbench GC settings. quick study In my experience, a typical production Rails app on Ruby 1.8 can recover 20% to 40% of user CPU by applying Stefan Kaes's Railsbench GC patch t...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

qcon presentation

March 13, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
qcon presentation

My QCon presentation is available. Improving Running Components at TwitterSome choice Tweets:philwills: Evan Weaver on scaling twitter at #qcon was full of interesting stuff and good questions from audience. markhneedham: fascinating readin...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments

secret codes

January 23, 2009
By Evan Weaver at Snax
secret codes

Here are some secret codes I am involved with. They are some of the best codes recently coded.kestrelA replacement for Starling, the distributed message queue. Written on the JVM (Scala) because of the mature garbage collector. Has a consta...
Read more »

Posted in Publishers, Snax - scaling Rails | View Comments