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Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

micahlerner.com

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Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#11

Post by reissbaker »

Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

A custom JIT + language + web framework + DB + queues + orchestrator + hardware built to your precise specifications + DCs all over the world go a long way ;)

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#13

Post by philippta »

velcrovan wrote: post #10

Seems like whenever I log into FB lately it's pretty much always in a state of “graceful feature degradation”. For example, as soon as I log in I see a bell icon in the upper right with a bright red circle containing an exact positive integer number of notifications. It practically screams “click here, you have urgent business”. I can then leave the web page sitting there for any number of minutes, and no matter how…

Without being able to verify, I would assume it’s designed to behave in this way. The longer you wait the more anticipation builds up, the more gratifying it becomes.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#15

Post by ndriscoll »

Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough money to make them extremely profitable despite it.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#16

Post by ipaddr »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #3
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Sounds plausible. There are probably many queries required to display a page and Facebook has 2 billion daily active users.

This is how information slowly changes. The original numbers from facebook needed to be taken with a grain of salt. 2 billion a day raises it more.

Facebook claims to have 2 billion accounts but no where near 2 billion unique accounts. I don't know what facebook calls an active user but it use to mean logged in once in the past 30 days.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#17

Post by ipaddr »

gaogao wrote: post #7
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Those queries are probably mostly memcache hits, though of course with distributed cache invalidation and consistency fun

If it doesn't hit the database is it really a query?

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#18

Post by bee_rider »

bagels wrote: post #9
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.

We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#19

Post by mrb »

Off-topic but: I love the font on the website. At first I thought it was the classic Computer Modern font (used in LateX). But nope. Upon inspection of the stylesheet, it's https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/ which was a font designed by Dmitry Krasny, Bonnie Scranton, and Edward Tufte. The font was originally designed for his book Beautiful Evidence. But people showed interest in font, see the bulletin board on ET's website: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... Initially he was reluctant to go the trouble of releasing it digitally. But eventually he did make it available on GitHub.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#20

Post by esafak »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
bagels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.

We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher (2011); early Facebook employee, and Cloudera cofounder.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/quote...

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