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Note: the talk is from May 2010. I wonder if Steve (or rather, jedberg or someone else at reddit) were to give the talk today, if 'memcache' and 'memcachedb' would both be replaced by Redis?
As for replacing memcached, I'm certainly open to it, but from what I've read, the performance of memcache for what we use it for is better than redis.
Why did they use Python in the first place? Reddit is still kind of unstable.
I dont think reddit's stability is as bad as it looks. Just that Reddit's community is pretty vocal on it. IIRC, they have availability in high 90s (may be jedberg can confirm).
For example, we heard "search sucks" for weeks after we switched to the new service, until we announced the switch, and then all of a sudden the tune changed. :)
Here's a thought: dynamic apps should render a page exactly one way in html, and rely on javascript and cookies to post-process the site so it APPEARS to be customized for that particular user. That includes admin widgets.
That particularly applies for displaying how many minutes ago something was generated. Serve it with a date-time format, use javascript to post-process into "x seconds ago" or "x minutes ago".
If someone isn't logged in, or isn't an admin, and they hack their javascript to display user or admin stuff, who cares? The user/admin requests sent to the webserver won't succeed anyway, because they rely on having an admin session cookie.
If there's meaningful rather than just UI stuff that users or admins get to see, then you have to cache that separately, but you can even do stuff like loading it dynamically with js so the publicly visible (cached) content can still be used, and you cut down the amount of stuff your server has to auto-generate. It can cache the separate pages (xml, json, whatever) that serve the logged-in user content, as well.
Why did they use Python in the first place? Reddit is still kind of unstable.
Are you trolling? Site stability issues very rarely have anything to do with the underlying programming language, unless you're using some experimental language that no one else is using for web development (and even then, Arc seems to be working pretty well for HN).
I'm always reluctant about going completely schemaless. Reminds me of the blog post by FriendFeed about how they use MySQL, highly recommended: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql I feel like like there needs to be a better middleground for having some schema but being able to augment it easily with metadata that you're not querying against (yet). Then later extracting the metadata into queryable…
We used Friendly at my previous company wego.com and t worked quite well although I don't know shehar they at still using it. (Friendly doesnt look like it's in activ development)
another lesson could be: "don't make a site that appeals to people who use ad-block. revenue won't keep up with demand."