

How to end the Fail Whales? With Blue Whales. - malvosenior
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9827

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jonknee
Summary: IBM consultant who could barely design a system that handles 18
million weekly transactions lets Twitter know what they need to do to "scale".
His advice is IBM main frames. Probably Oracle too. Yes, this is still the
year 2009.

This was a very weird article:

> I had just completed a project for a large government agency that needed a
> system that could accomplish approximately 5,500 database row inserts and
> reads per second, or approximately 18 million transactions per week.

Not even close--5,500 a second comes to over 3 billion weekly transactions. 18
million transactions is nothing, that can be handled on a VPS.

> And as a customer requirement, we had to do it with COMMODITY HARDWARE.

Here's his idea of commodity hardware:

> The heart of the “beast”, as those of us referred to it, was comprised of 4
> Unisys ES7000-based Oracle 10g RAC nodes, each using 256GB of RAM and
> sixteen dual-core Intel Xeon processors, and the most sophisticated, high-
> performance Cisco 10Gbps Ethernet switching that money could buy which was
> available between all the main clustered and load balanced tiers of the
> system — Web, J2EE Application Servers, Messaging Queue and Database.

Probably a million dollars in hardware and it barely was able to do 18m weekly
transactions. Now for his advice to Twitter:

> No, there’s only one systems architecture that will solve the Fail Whales
> once and for all. As much as I hate coming off like an IBM commercial — cue
> the blue background and jazz music on Tech Broiler — the solution to the
> Fail Whale is a Blue Whale — an IBM System Z. A Mainframe. Or two.
> Preferably in a SYSPLEX configuration.

"Enterprise" people really grind my gears. Google started with servers in LEGO
cases. Even today they just use tons of not very important hardware. The
solution to scaling Twitter isn't throwing $2m to IBM, it's not trying to run
it out of a RDBMS.

In the long run you won't be able to buy your way out of a shitty foundation.

~~~
moe
Actually for twitter it could very well be the cheapest option when you
consider what their imminent scala debacle will cost them.

When you fail for _three years_ to stabilize one of the simplest imaginable
architectures (pub/sub) then throwing some money at IBM to run your broken app
off a big iron that "just doesn't care" doesn't seem unreasonable.

It could just buy them the time they need to cash out and be done.

~~~
jonknee
> Actually for twitter it could very well be the cheapest option when you
> consider what their imminent scala debacle will cost them.

Why is re-writing some of the system in Scala a debacle and or expensive? I
haven't followed it too closely, but I got the impression that they have had
success with it so far.

~~~
moe
_Why is re-writing some of the system in Scala a debacle and or expensive? I
haven't followed it too closely, but I got the impression that they have had
success with it so far._

Well, when you have a track record of screwing up on a fairly simple problem
for 3 years straight then a switch of programming language will not magically
solve that for you.

------
andr
Anyone else find it funny that this post coincides with COBOL's 50-year
birthday?

It's a good PR move, though. By showing that mainframes work for Web 2.0 (even
with a faulty argument) they'll probably score a corporate sale or two.

