LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
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Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#2It sounds like they went through a major rewrite of their backend and ended up architecting things to be much more performant than their previous system. I'm curious to find out what parts of the system they think contributed most to the performance increase. While this is interesting it is by no means an apples to apples comparison of Node and Rails as the headline suggests.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#3If you are thinking about using node.js for this reason[1] on most sites, you are optimizing poorly. LinkedIn didn't worry about this until after they were a public company.
If Python/Djando or Ruby/Rails can get your app out the door and into customer hands faster, it is almost always the right thing to use.
1. There are certainly other, very valid, technical reasons for choosing node.js over other technologies early. But let those reasons be about the problems you are solving today, not the ones you might need to worry about when you have 50 servers to deal with.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#4I personally find it hard to believe that all of LinkedIn was only running on 30 servers, and is now running on only 3.
EDIT: Mobile only. Maybe the title should be updated to reflect that.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#5Reading this like: "Hey, our previous backend was a total turd, technically speaking." It might be trivial to speed up your own crappy first implementation 20x with some extra TLC.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#6It sounds like they went through a major rewrite of their backend and ended up architecting things to be much more performant than their previous system. I'm curious to find out what parts of the system they think contributed most to the performance increase. While this is interesting it is by no means an apples to apples comparison of Node and Rails as the headline suggests.
The aggressive caching approach taken by Basecamp Next is another example of such an optimization: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#7Can someone update the title to read: "LinkedIn Moved from Server to Client: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster"?
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#8I personally find it hard to believe that all of LinkedIn was only running on 30 servers, and is now running on only 3. EDIT: Mobile only. Maybe the title should be updated to reflect that.
> I personally find it hard to believe that all of LinkedIn was only running on 30 servers, and is now running on only 3.
I can believe it, if their caching strategy was garbage before and part of a massive rewrite was rethinking that. If you fail to use your caches, you'll pay for it.
I mean it's not like LinkedIn is about split-second changes, you could probably statically generate most of it and serve it with a single nginx instance.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#9Can someone update the title to read: "LinkedIn Moved from Server to Client: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster"?
But that would be wrong, the server legitiamtely moved from rails to node. Just because node is JavaScript doesn't mean that it automatically runs on the client, JavaScript is a perfectly viable server language too.
The title could be improved by reflecting that this is for LinkedIn mobile, but the rails->node is correct.
Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster
#10If you are thinking about using node.js for this reason[1] on most sites, you are optimizing poorly. LinkedIn didn't worry about this until after they were a public company. If Python/Djando or Ruby/Rails can get your app out the door and into customer hands faster, it is almost always the right thing to use. 1. There are certainly other, very valid, technical reasons for choosing node.js over other technologies earl…
I'm sure LinkedIn could have cut servers without switching to node. Take your first, crappy implementation and rewrite it in the same language and you'll probably still see at least 10x improvement, if not 20.