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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

#71

Post by dmorgan »

andybak wrote: post #57
dmorgan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will probably will get the same mess. There is plenty of literature about that. I.e: A complete rewrite is what killed Netscape That's a meme started by a Joel Spolsky article, and maybe an allusion to the "second system effect" (which is about something else altogether). Hardly "plenty of literature about that". Actually, the complete rewrite might killed Netscape, but it saved Mozilla and Firefox. And Netscap…

It's got a slightly longer history than just being a Joel Spolsky meme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Noticed how I already wrote about that? To quote:

"That's a meme started by a Joel Spolsky article, and maybe an allusion to the "second system effect" (which is about something else altogether)."

That said, the "second system effect" is not about merely rewriting risks, but especially about architecture and design choices. From the very wikipedia article:

"""People who have designed something only once before, try to do all the things they "did not get to do last time," loading the project up with all the things they put off while making version one, even if most of them should be put off in version two as well."""

That is, if you design your rewrite _without_ wanting to build a bigger, more involved product, but merely a cleaner and more cleanly made product, this does not apply.

Another quote from the very article: """The second-system effect refers to the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors."""

This is not the case we refer to here. The Netscape got by version 4 had gotten an ungodly mess (and even before that), not a "small, elegant" system. And Mozilla/Firefox, the rewrite, is cleaner and more elegant than Netscape was.

Consider a 100 line Python script. People can rewrite it from scratch in 100 different ways, while improving upon it with no problem. At some point of complexity this stops being true, but Brooks was talking about huge projects, built by enormous teams, like OS/360 and such. Not some 20K - 100K line web project.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#72

Post by markmm »

jonny_eh wrote: post #50
markmm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would spend a little extra time upfront and save many many expensive rewrites latter on. Use C from the start, you won't need to rewrite just scale with hardware. This argument that using Ruby (or any language that makes programming easy but runs like treacle) to get something out the door a few months earlier is bullshit, I would rather release something a few months later that I didn't have to totally rewrite dow…

But the odds of the thing you release actually getting used are low. So make it fast, and if it's a hit, then deal with that.

Wow!! your comment encapsulates the thinking of every wannabe startup loser that ends up smoking crack on some beach in San Francisco"

Will making it faster increase the chances of more people using it? Also this attitude of building shit products (Yes software is a product) because..well the chances are it will fail.. is precisely why so many startups fail. This is why you get one crapola startup after another........

"Show HN: Crap.ly -- we built this in 3 weeks using Ruby, it will scale up to 20 users before craping out, its a twitter scraper that connects to app.net and diaspora showing how much Money your Kick-starter project has made and includes quotes from Paul Graham about how to build a successful startup, because he has built so many"

Imagine Linus had built Linux using fucking node.js

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#73

Post by zorked »

pdelgallego wrote: post #35
Smudge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Take your first, crappy implementation and rewrite it in the same language and you'll probably still see at least 10x improvement. You will probably will get the same mess. There is plenty of literature about that. I.e: A complete rewrite is what killed Netscape

As bad as Netscape 4 was, what killed the company was their decision to charge for the browser while their monopolitic competidor was giving it away for free.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#74

Post by skeletonjelly »

omaranto wrote: post #34
nicholassmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This times a thousand. When you first write the software you're basing it on expectations, no matter how well you plan, but when you rewrite it you're coming at it with real world knowledge of the pain points so of course it's going to be better in terms of performance.

"This times a thousand" would be an improvement by a factor of 10000. The improvement should definitely not be that large.

You're getting downvoted because the poster was referring to the gravity/importance of the message.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#75

Post by dmorgan »

tedunangst wrote: post #63
dmorgan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will probably will get the same mess. There is plenty of literature about that. I.e: A complete rewrite is what killed Netscape That's a meme started by a Joel Spolsky article, and maybe an allusion to the "second system effect" (which is about something else altogether). Hardly "plenty of literature about that". Actually, the complete rewrite might killed Netscape, but it saved Mozilla and Firefox. And Netscap…

the complete rewrite might killed Netscape, but it saved Mozilla and Firefox. What do you mean?

I mean that while Netscape, the company, succumbed while waiting to put out their new competitive browser, we now have the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox.

We wouldn't have those if it wasn't for the rewrite. The old code was a mess even before version 4 (by its developers own admission), and it could never get to the point of competing in the engine space ever again.

That is, with the old Netscape rendering engine it would not be possible to extend it to compete in the modern HTML5/Canvas/GPU acceleration/CSS3/add-ons/separate contexts for each tab/etc era.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#76

Post by SoftwareMaven »

markmm wrote: post #39
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #3

If 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 would spend a little extra time upfront and save many many expensive rewrites latter on. Use C from the start, you won't need to rewrite just scale with hardware. This argument that using Ruby (or any language that makes programming easy but runs like treacle) to get something out the door a few months earlier is bullshit, I would rather release something a few months later that I didn't have to totally rewrite dow…

Said with true engineering "vision".

The reason why "getting it out the door" is so important is because nobody behind the door generally has any idea about what people will really pay for. By making it fast (read: cheap) to make, if you find that you don't get it right, you can try again, and again, and again.

Now, you can argue that "they shouldn't be releasing without knowing they will be successful", but if they have the ability to see the future, they should just take that VC money and put it in the market. People like Steve Blank and Eric Ries have a lot of evidence how running most startups (software startups particularly) using a "build it and they will come" attitude is ripe with failure.

Now, if you are just building for fun, that's different. I knew a guy building a Dropbox clone in C. More power to him (though I wouldn't have touched it, because I think it is too hard to get security right all the time in a language like C).

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#77

Post by bgilroy26 »

markmm wrote: post #72
jonny_eh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the odds of the thing you release actually getting used are low. So make it fast, and if it's a hit, then deal with that.

Wow!! your comment encapsulates the thinking of every wannabe startup loser that ends up smoking crack on some beach in San Francisco" Will making it faster increase the chances of more people using it? Also this attitude of building shit products (Yes software is a product) because..well the chances are it will fail.. is precisely why so many startups fail. This is why you get one crapola startup after another......…

You're not yourself when you're hungry.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#78

Post by omaranto »

omaranto wrote: post #34
nicholassmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This times a thousand. When you first write the software you're basing it on expectations, no matter how well you plan, but when you rewrite it you're coming at it with real world knowledge of the pain points so of course it's going to be better in terms of performance.

"This times a thousand" would be an improvement by a factor of 10000. The improvement should definitely not be that large.

Thanks for the explanation, skeletonjelly. I think the reason I misunderstood is that I don't hang out on the Internet enough: a friend explained to me that "This." and "this times a thousand" are Internet slang that mean "I agree" (the second, presumably means something like "On a scale from 1 to infinity my agreement level is 1000." :). As far I know these expressions aren't used verbally, which would explain why I took it literally.

Re: LinkedIn Mobile Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster

#80

Post by JL2010 »

markmm wrote: post #68
andybak wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to seeing C as the go-to web-development language. Really? C for a problem that is largely string manipulation and database access?

Why are they moving from Ruby if it's just "string manipulation and database access"? The problem is folks, as soon as you get a large number of users every compromise you made by using a toy language or database is magnified 1000 times. Google didn't implement in some scripting language to get to the market a few months early.

An excerpt from Google history:

----------------------------

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.

-Larry Page pagecs.stanford.edu

----------------------------

There's something to be said about rapid prototyping and evaluation.

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