

Lessons Learned While Building Reddit to 270 Million Page Views a Month - ai09
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/17/7-lessons-learned-while-building-reddit-to-270-million-page.html

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jheriko
"By far the most surprising feature of their architecture is in Lesson Six,
whose essential idea is: The key to speed is to precompute everything and
cache It."

That made me LOL. Is this really surprising? A symptom of years of high-level
web development or similar... ?

This is /the/ classical optimisation strategy - since the day of pen and paper
computations (anyone remember "log" books?).

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saturdayplace
> Steve says a lot of the lessons were really obvious, so you may not find a
> lot of completely new ideas in the presentation.

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izend
It appears they should abandon their relational database if they are not using
any of relational features.

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jwegan
I think they use Cassandra as there database so they already have.

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stephenjudkins
I believe they're using Cassandra a sophisticated caching layer. It's not the
"canonical" data store, but replaces Memcachedb.

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apphacker
I don't know why people keep using reddit as a reference for how to do
scaling. Reddit is a slow website with frequent outages. It should be a how
not to example if anything.

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clistctrl
Not sure if you know this, but Alexis Ohanian is a member on this forum.

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apphacker
Not sure why that matters.

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kn0thing
Indeed - especially since I've retired from reddit. Though, I do still feel
obligated to respond to complaints/criticism; in this case, though, I can't
comment on technical decisions - except to say that reddit's recent scaling
problems are likely more to do with their dev count (4 - yes, there are four
developers working on reddit. That's 1 dev for every ~2Million uniques a
month) than technical decisions.

