Live data from Hacker News

MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem

groups.google.com

1–10 of 184 posts

Re: MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem

#4
For example, if we had notifications in place to alert us 12 hours earlier that we needed more capacity, we could have added a third shard, migrated data, and then compacted the slaves.

Where did Foursquare find their engineers? I hope no one lost their job here but this is pretty elementary stuff.

Re: MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem

#7
post #4

For example, if we had notifications in place to alert us 12 hours earlier that we needed more capacity, we could have added a third shard, migrated data, and then compacted the slaves. Where did Foursquare find their engineers? I hope no one lost their job here but this is pretty elementary stuff.

A bit harsh but a good point. There are a few red flags here. Resource monitoring on the servers, like you mentioned, seems pretty obvious. Especially considering that the system was almost guaranteed to crash when it ran out of RAM.

Sharding needs to be managed in a way that evenly distributes the data. I would never do it by user ID unless a proper analysis of the data showed it to be a fairly even distribution.

Re: MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem

#8
I wonder if there ought to be a move to allow for sharded systems to lump groups/pages nicely.. kind of like MySQL's partitioning.. where you won't run into the issue of sparsing out pages when you migrate data.. instead you'd effectively migrate pages.

Re: MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem

#9

I wonder if there ought to be a move to allow for sharded systems to lump groups/pages nicely.. kind of like MySQL's partitioning.. where you won't run into the issue of sparsing out pages when you migrate data.. instead you'd effectively migrate pages.

Yes - something that keeps data organized my shard key is being planned.
Post reply on HN