Would be great to hear more specifics of the rewrite. What did the API do, what pieces were built in RR, what got replaced in Go, etc.
At least as much as you're willing to share. :-)
How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
61–70 of 511 posts
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#62How about BDD, test-driven development and quality insurance? Does Go provide an ecosystem that supports agile refactorings that are common in lean startups?
You can say anything bad about the performance of Ruby and Rails etc. but rspec, cucumber, capybara, vcr, factorygirl are really important features to start from zero and reach a viable product.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it can't. People don't use only Java because they "just want to get things done." They use only Java because that's all they learned, and all they need for their day job. If not, then they will invariably step over languages that are very interesting but obscure.
I'll give an anecdote. I've spent the last 7 years using Ada, a language that is /both/ interesting and obscure, almost exclusively. It's really a fantastic language that is frequently neglected much like poor Go, but with more merit. Anyway, in preparing the launch of my company's first iteration of its podcast network ( http://76streetnetwork.com ), I absolutely wanted to use Ada, but the allure of the utterly fant…
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't use Java--just that "I've only ever used Java" is a pretty good indicator of somebody not being genuinely interested in software development, and different ways to do things. I'd take somebody who learned Ada for fun over somebody who learned Java in school (and did nothing else) for a Java job any day.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#64Interesting to hear of Go being used in production. It'd be great to hear some more details on your setup when deploying the go processes - how are you managing failover, what's your load balancer, and how are you handling swapping out processes etc? Are you compiling on the server or local machines before deployment? Most other languages have lots of solutions on the deployment side now but Go is so new there isn't…
For my (toy) apps, I've been compiling locally and pushing to the server. It's trivial to compile for a target platform and architecture, and you get a single compiled binary. Certainly my response isn't getting all the way to what you're looking for, but it's not difficult to write shell scripts that manage the deploy process from here.
Thanks, I use rsync wrapped in a script usually (because I'm dealing with more files than just a binary), haven't tried cross compiling yet but was going to give that a go. I suppose I was more concerned about what happens when things are on the server and how multiple processes can be managed. As soon as you have more than one and want to swap out server workers seamlessly and load balance etc it gets a little more complicated.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#65Last month I picked NodeJS and build couple of sites with it. This month, I want to pick up something new. I was hesitating between Python and Go. Can you answer couple of questions about Go from someone coming from NodeJS: 1- What is the state of the external Go libraries, especially DB (MySql), caching libraries (memcached), protocol libraries (Oauth). Are they stable 100% 2- How easy is logging and tracing in go?…
Memcached's author (Brad Fitzpatrick) is a Go user, and wrote a memcache client for Go. Go has a bunch of good stuff surrounding SQL. I haven't used MySQL, personally, so I can't comment on which MySQL driver is best, but I know YouTube uses Go for something related to MySQL, though I can't say for certain exactly what. http://code.google.com/p/vitess The goauth2 ( http://code.google.com/p/goauth2 ) library is writte…
There's also the mgo library for MongoDB which is probably one of the best Mongo libraries out there (even 10gen thinks so): http://labix.org/mgo
And http://github.com/lib/pq for Postgres.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#66Go's definitely picking up momentum. I know that Mozilla is shifting much of its services infrastructure to Go.
We're porting over our Arabic sentiment engine, currently in Python/Cython to Go. If you're dealing with simple data structures, going from Python to Go is almost a line-for-line port, but the performance benefits are, of course, massive. Our benchmarks show a 40x speed improvement so far.
Lastly, for anyone thinking about taking the plunge, use Go tip (from their source code repo) - don't use their "stable" releases. They fix bugs so fast you'll always want to be current.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#67Hey that's my photo of the GOpher! :) [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/jianshen/8080852738/in/photostr...
Monitor Stands!!
[1] https://plus.google.com/photos/100264837158995116368/albums/...
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#68"We decided to rewrite the API" and now it is over 300x faster. Go had nothing to do with this, it was obviously some boneheaded original design. Probably something like fork+exec on a Ruby VM on each request to enter a chroot.
I know HN has a hard-on for Go but come on.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#69What changed in the architecture? It is rather interesting that by just having a language change you could remove 28 servers from the system.
My guess is that removing 2-5 layers of abstraction can get you pretty far along.
We're writing most of the systems for our company in Go, and of the many reasons this ranked highly. Just removing the multiple unnecessary abstractions gets you a hell of a lot of simplicity and performance back.
Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". Sure, I happen to write more C++, Python, and C than anything else, but I've dabbled in just about everything and could reach comfortable proficiency in a matter of weeks. Most of programming and all of computer science is universal. Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default.
What, you don't know about The Programmer Hierarchy? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622553 http://lukewelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/programmer... I find a lot of people who use high-level languages are terrified of tediously direct contact with the machine, and a lot of people who use low-level languages are terrified of the performance costs of abstraction. I'm terrified of both. I think that in gene…
Love this comment, "I'm terrified of both."