This seems like one of those listicle-style, content-free article, all markers of what is possibly a ChatGPT generated article.
Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#12It was just a system designed from the start with efficiency in mind, rather than business flexibility. Almost any system can do the same if you start from the basics of "how many bytes of data do I need to move?", and "how many bytes of data can this ethernet cable/CPU transfer each second?" The end result is a system which is typically lower level and less flexible, but has much better money and hardware efficiency…
Node js is a surprisingly lightweight API layer for manipulating Linux IO
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#13It was just a system designed from the start with efficiency in mind, rather than business flexibility. Almost any system can do the same if you start from the basics of "how many bytes of data do I need to move?", and "how many bytes of data can this ethernet cable/CPU transfer each second?" The end result is a system which is typically lower level and less flexible, but has much better money and hardware efficiency…
Node js is a surprisingly lightweight API layer for manipulating Linux IO
The problem is that the NodeJS ecosystem infrastructure doesn't exactly like efficient programming - you have to go pretty much bare metal to actually be lightweight.
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#14> They eliminated feature creep at all costs. Not anymore. I'm wondering how many engineers they have now to develop and maintain all the non-chat features.
They are still so much better than almost anyone else in the space at preventing feature creep. It is still a remarkably small and focused app.
Is it? WhatsApp calls home a lot in background, so much it was draining my phone’s battery. Also, business features are coming for a while, bloating the app. Heck, on iOS its installer has 163 MB!
Crypto shit aside, I think Signal is way more focused. Element/Matrix, too.
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#15Does anyone know if they still use Elixir or was it always just Erlang?
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#16This seems like one of those listicle-style, content-free article, all markers of what is possibly a ChatGPT generated article.
Yeah, very likely AI generated. Also extremely light and any meaningful concrete details. For examples things like /single responsibility principle" or "small teams" you can just put them anywhere to pad the length
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#17My first question would be if the messages can be sent P2P or if they have to be passed through / stored on servers. If they can be sent and stored on the users devices, the server would only be a discovery service processing the occasional "Hey, I have a new IP" and "Hey, I want to send a message to X, please give me their current IP" messages. If the messages would have to be processed by servers, the system could…
> If they can be sent and stored on the users devices, the server would only be a discovery service processing the occasional "Hey, I have a new IP" and "Hey, I want to send a message to X, please give me their current IP" messages.
You can't just send messages directly to end user devices' IPs unless there's no firewall or NAT in front of them. Good luck forwarding a port on a mobile device.
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#18> They eliminated feature creep at all costs. Not anymore. I'm wondering how many engineers they have now to develop and maintain all the non-chat features.
They are still so much better than almost anyone else in the space at preventing feature creep. It is still a remarkably small and focused app.
I think this is because of FB/Meta. I would assume that they dont have massive financial restrictions from investors due to their data harvesting capability. Other apps like Telegram, however, might work harder to introduce money-making features.
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#19[deleted]
Re: Why WhatsApp Was Able to Support 50B Messages a Day with 32 Engineers
#20If you only focus on sending messages, you will get huge scalability.
If you look at it, much of the problem was already solved at a fundamental level: kernel/network developers have been thinking about how to efficiently send messages since forever. Jabber devs had thought about certain problems on top of that as well.
Put those together and don't add anything, you should be able to send a huge number of messages. Keep in mind it's not latency sensitive either, people can live with getting their messages 1s or late and with significant jitter.
That's not to poop on the success of WhatsApp, I do think it's a good product. But it's a the product that enables the engineering to stay focused.