Technology

Optimizing cache infrastructure

I love when engineering teams share their tricks of trade for other organizations to benefit. While this might seem counter-intuitive, sharing knowledge makes the entire ecosystem better.

Etsy‘ engineering team does a great job of publishing their architecture, methodologies and code at https://codeascraft.com.

This particular article on how they optimize their caching infrastructure (https://codeascraft.com/2017/11/30/how-etsy-caches/) is pretty enlightening. I always thought the best method to load balance objects (app hits, cache requests, queues etc) to hosts was to use mod operations. In this blog post Etsy’ team talk about using consistent hashing instead of modulo hashing.

At a high level, it allows cache nodes to fail and not impact the overall performance of the application drastically in addition to making it easy to scale the number of nodes. This method is useful when you have a large amount of cache nodes.

More reference links

  • http://www.tom-e-white.com/2007/11/consistent-hashing.html
  • https://www.toptal.com/big-data/consistent-hashing
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing

 

January 3, 2018 by Programming Technology Web 0

DID YOU KNOW : Advanced Search in Microsoft Explorer

I was trying to search for some files on my laptop today and wanted to filter the search for filed modified in the last few weeks. Like, show me all files that contain the word “American” and modified in the last 2 weeks. Doing this on a Linux machine would have been a simple filter using find. But this is Microsoft :).

Thanks to some Googling, I ran across something called “Advanced Query Syntax” that is a core part of Microsoft’ ecosystem (OS, Office etc).

So the same search ended up being

American datemodified:this month

There are a lot of cool ways you can filter your queries using the other keywords in AQS.

December 27, 2017 by DID YOU KNOW Technology Windows 0

How data streams work (AKA queue design)

Good blog post by Timothy Downs on how queues and data streams work with a layman example at https://hackernoon.com/introduction-to-redis-streams-133f1c375cd3

Quoting the example here

We have a very long book which we would like many people to read. Some can read during their lunch hour, some read on Monday nights, others take it home for the weekend. The book is so long that at any point in time, we have hundreds of people reading it.

Readers of our book need to keep track of where they are up to in our book, so they keep track of their location by putting a bookmark in the book. Some readers read very slow, leaving their bookmark close to the beginning. Other readers give up halfway, leaving theirs in the middle and never coming back to it.

To make matters even worse, we are adding pages to this book every day. Nobody can actually finish this book.

Eventually our book fills up with bookmarks, until finally one day it is too heavy to carry and nobody can read it any more.

A very clever person then decided that readers should not be allowed to place bookmarks inside the book, and must instead write down the page they are up to on their diary.

This is the design of Apache Kafka, and it is a very resilient design. Readers are often not responsible citizens and often will not clean up after themselves, and the book may be the log of all the important events that happen in our company.

December 20, 2017 by Technology 0