Viewing profile — robotadam

Opening the site in Firefox avoided the redirect to login issue for me.

I agree with you; a lot of the reason it took us a while to get out of EC2 was my lack of comfort. If I had pushed that earlier many things would have been easier. There are so man…

I definitely could have been more clear on that. Cassandra has so many great properties, and when we made the decision to use Postgres for the large dataset under question was shor…

The Heroku guys are doing some seriously awesome things with Postgres. I can't wait to see where they go with it; the whole community will benefit, I'm sure.

We make heavy use of queue and internal messaging systems. This discussion was solely about the data storage layers, which always causes us more headaches than the messaging/queuin…

Sorry about that -- I couldn't speak as much about our Hbase experience, but I can speak to the toll its taken on our ops team so far, which is very high, with lots of crashes.

You are very right; I should have tried to have us move to physical hardware before we did. Definitely one of the things that I would have done differently, in hindsight. The large…

Thanks for the kind words, everyone. When I was writing the talk I was worried it'd be too tied to our/my experience, but at least people found it a little entertaining. The video …

According to the docs, this is a blocking operation -- so it's inplace, but I wouldn't consider it to be online, as I would PostgreSQL's vacuum or Cassandra's major compactions: ht…

We made the switch before 1.8 was released, and made the decision during the 1.6 cycle, give or take. Auto-sharding never worked reliably in our tests. I think schmichael does a go…

In addition, some ELBs are seeing failures with routing, so that wouldn't help, either.

getLastError (or safe=true) does not force the write to the disk. Checking getLastError determines whether the server accepted the write, or whether there were failures (uniqueness…

Do you mean connections to the queue server, or outgoing connections? In either case, it would affect it only slightly (I imagine) if the connections were persistent, as they are i…

I'm a little confused by this; how do SQL databases not support more atomic operations that MongoDB, seeing as you have full control of the transactions themselves? Incrementing, a…

The U.S. does have a similar program, the Self-Employment Assistance Program: http://www.workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/unemploy/self.asp It's a Federal program, but the states have …

A good question. Shrinking TCP buffer sizes can have a negative performance impact when sending large amounts of data; our use case was keeping track of a large number of mostly si…

We got over 500k/instance: http://blog.urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action...

It's a spike as in a spike solution -- an end-to-end prototype to see if a chosen method of solving the problem is feasible, but without writing tests or handling all error cases o…

MongoDB has a single, global read/write lock for the entire database. So when a write is actually processing, nothing else can happen. In a moderately write-heavy environment, a si…

Here's the initial note from the forum. I copied it before and can't reload, so I don't know the user that posted it. "During a shared library update distributed to our hosts, a nu…

I agree with you, especially with regard to open source related conferences (I've made great friends at PyCon); but perhaps there's a difference at the more old-fashioned corporate…

A breach in your OpenID account is the same security risk as a breach in your email account, if the sites do account recovery via email.

You could use a dedicated OpenID provider, like MyOpenID. If you have a simple website or blog where you can edit meta tags in the HTML, then you can delegate. For example, I use m…