

Steve Huffman on Lessons Learned at Reddit - giu
http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/steve-huffman-on-lessons-learned-at-reddit/

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0nly1ife
Interesting. I'm an indie Facebook developer. My most popular app has over 8
million monthly uniques and 350 million pageviews. I didn't realize how
substantial said traffic was until reading this article. I scaled my app to
that size on my own over the course of 12 months. I know of other FB devs who
scaled bigger apps working solo. If average hackers like us can do it, anyone
can. The hard part is building a popular app. Articles about scaling are a
means for founders to brag about their success without giving away useful
information about what made their app popular in the first place.

~~~
staunch
Alexis Ohanian has talked about what made Reddit successful many times. Steve
Huffman is talking about the technical side of things. It doesn't come off as
bragging to me at all.

~~~
0nly1ife
Bragging is the wrong word, but it is the first that came to mind. And I was
excited to brag about the size of my app when I first read his article.

I just think we spend too much time talking about scaling and not enough time
discussing virality.

~~~
strlen
Scalability stories are generally interesting, as they're about solving
problems that out-of-the-box commercial software doesn't. They're interesting
to hackers, not all of whom are entrepreneurs.

If you'd like to share a story, however, on using statistical techniques to
measure and act on virality, doing multi-variate testing, et al that would be
_very_ interesting.

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akkartik
The approach he recommends - no scheme, extreme denormalization, lots of
redundancy - is a strong case for nosql.

~~~
bh23ha
Shouldn't lots of redundancy be a fundamental part of which ever db you are
using.

As to extreme do-normalization, colour me sceptical, why not parallelise and
throw more hardware at the problem?

~~~
dalore
Because it's more cost effective to de-normalize then to parallelise in this
instance.

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evgen
Let's see:

\- crash and let a supervisor restart you

\- isolate components via specialist processes and systems

\- keep schema/types flexible

\- be stateless

\- cache & denormalize

\- be redundant

\- let other processes handle non-realtime tasks in the background

Sounds like he spent a long time learning the hard way that reddit should have
been written in Erlang in the first place :)

~~~
Hexstream
Well, they use (or used to use) RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang.

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dimarco
a note for Mixergy: this is how you provide a video transcript.

~~~
AndrewWarner
Checking it out now.

Thanks Mark.

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clemesha
Their strong usage of both Memcached and Memcachedb makes me think of my
favorite 'all-in-one' solution: Redis.

~~~
philjackson
Cassandra (which they moved to in the end) is also an excellent all-in-one
solution. It even supports Hadoop since 0.6.

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bryanh
So many lectures on scaling are full of best-practices that are somewhat
removed from reality and time/budget constraints. This lecture on the other
hand has a lot of common-sense advice and solutions that may be obvious to
some, but I must admit, this is going to help me (if I could get the traffic
to worry about scaling...).

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niktech
Direct link to an iPhone watchable video:
<http://vimeo.com/channels/carsonifiedtv#10506751>

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kingkilr
Joe Stump gave a similar talk at EuroDjangoCon last year (the topic is
officially: dealing with a fuckload of data, but a lot of the same lessons).
Unfortunately I have no idea what became of the recordings.

~~~
sumeeta
There’s also _Scaling your Python application on EC2_ from PyCon 2010:
<http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/>

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jim-greer
Did they say what forced them into emergency read-only mode this week?

~~~
mr_justin
He says (transcript is below the video) that he left Reddit in the Fall of
2007 but continued working as a contractor until the Fall of 2009 so he
doesn't really address the current events of Reddit.

~~~
kn0thing
That transcript is misleading. Steve stayed with reddit until Fall of 2009
when our contracts ended. He didn't leave to work as a contractor.

One thing I should also mention is that our deal was structured in such a way
that either one of us could've left reddit before our contract ended without
too much pain (missing some carrots, granted) but we were still rather
attached to reddit, the community, and our friends (team reddit). Personally,
I did also feel a compulsion to fulfill my side of the contract and make sure
Condé Nast got its money's worth. That may make me a tool in the eyes of most
Hacker News folks, but so be it.

~~~
by
When you sold the site to Condé Nast they became your customer. Looking after
your customers is the number one priority of any business. So it is totally
correct that you made sure they received a good product and got the best from
it.

