December 2009
6 posts
Hard drives with 4K sectors instead of current... →
AnandTech explains why Western Digital is manufacturing hard drives with larger sectors (4K) instead of the current standard 512B sectors.
Last.fm uses MogileFS with SSDs →
Summary:
They used SSDs to store hot songs.
They picked the simple FIFO noop scheduler in the Linux I/O subsystem. For more info on the different schedulers, read Redhat’s IO Tuning Guide. They also set read_ahead_kb to a very low value since seek times are so low for SSDs anyway.
Modified MogileFS to differentiate between storage nodes with SSDs and nodes with regular HDDs.
1 SSD =>...
http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2009/12/stuff-iv... →
Do’s and don’ts for programmers (not the technical stuff but the soft skills, behavior, attitude at work) by Sriram who works for Microsoft’s Azure team. I’ve already experienced and observed several things from his list since I started working for this other big software company.
How node.js exposes traditional blocking I/O calls...
If you’ve not heard about node.js, do watch the video from a talk given by Ryan Dahl (project lead) at JSConfEU 2009.
The thing which I found most interesting is how he handled the shortcomings of libraries like eventmachine. eventmachine is great for building highly-scalable single-threaded network servers using async network I/O. But while writing your network servers, you’ve to...
Tumblr backup tool in 40 lines of Clojure
The code doesn’t necessarily do a lot of error handling.
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November 2009
3 posts
Last.fm interview with CNET →
What I found interesting - they use SSDs for serving out popular radio streams and regular HDDs for the rest of their streams. Streaming is done via regular Linux boxes running MogileFS.