31–40 of 90 posts
This article touches on "Request Coalescing" which is a super important concept - I've also seen this called "dog-pile prevention" in the past. Varnish has this built in - good to see it's easy to configure with NGINX too. One of my favourite caching proxy tricks is to run a cache with a very short timeout, but with dog-pile prevention baked in. This can be amazing for protecting against sudden unexpected traffic spi…
I like to blog from the raw origin and not use CDNs because if a blogpost is changed I have to manually purge the CDN cache, which can happen a lot. Also CDNs have the caveat in that if they're down, it can make a page load very slow since it tries to load the asset.
This is cool and informative and Kurt's writing is great: The briny deeps are filled with undersea cables, crying out constantly to nearby ships: "drive through me"! Land isn't much better, as the old networkers shanty goes: "backhoe, backhoe, digging deep — make the backbone go to sleep".
fly.io has a fantastic engineering blog. Has anyone used them as a customer (enterprise or otherwise) and have any thoughts?
I moved my authoritative DNS name servers over to Fly a few months ago. After some initial teething issues with Fly's UDP support (which were quickly resolved) it's been smooth sailing.
The Fly UX via the flyctl command-line app is excellent, very Heroku-like. Only downside is it makes me mad when I have to fight the horrendous AWS tooling in my day job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
just started to use them for an elixir/phoenix project. multi region with distributed nodes just works. feels almost magically after all the aws work I've done the past few years.
What’s magically? I was under the impression that fly.io today (though they are working on it) doesn’t do anything unique to make hosting elixir/Phoenix app easier. See this comment by the fly.io team. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27704852
But we've got full-time people working on Elixir now, too; we'll see where that goes. We've still got Elixir limerence here. :)
This article touches on "Request Coalescing" which is a super important concept - I've also seen this called "dog-pile prevention" in the past. Varnish has this built in - good to see it's easy to configure with NGINX too. One of my favourite caching proxy tricks is to run a cache with a very short timeout, but with dog-pile prevention baked in. This can be amazing for protecting against sudden unexpected traffic spi…
"Thundering herd" problem is how I have always heard it called.
The thundering herd problem specifically refers to what happens if you coordinate things so that all your incoming requests occur simultaneously. Imagine that over the course of a week, you tell everyone who needs something from you "I'm busy right now; please come back next Tuesday at 11:28 am". You'll be overwhelmed on Tuesday at 11:28 am regardless of whether your average weekly workload is high or low, because you concentrated your entire weekly workload into the same one minute. You solve the thundering herd problem by not giving out the same retry time to everyone who contacts you while you're busy.
>The term "CDN" ("content delivery network") conjures Google-scale companies managing huge racks of hardware, wrangling hundreds of gigabits per second. But CDNs are just web applications. That's not how we tend to think of them, but that's all they are. You can build a functional CDN on an 8-year-old laptop while you're sitting at a coffee shop. huh yeah never thought about it I blame how CDNs are advertised for the…
CDN software might be simple in the basic happy case, but you still need a Network of nodes to Deliver the Content.
This article touches on "Request Coalescing" which is a super important concept - I've also seen this called "dog-pile prevention" in the past. Varnish has this built in - good to see it's easy to configure with NGINX too. One of my favourite caching proxy tricks is to run a cache with a very short timeout, but with dog-pile prevention baked in. This can be amazing for protecting against sudden unexpected traffic spi…
Not quite the same layer, but in node.js I’m a fan of the memoize(fn)->promise pattern where you wrap a promise-returning function to return the _same_ promise for any callers passing the same arguments. It’s a fairly simple caching mechanism that coalesces requests and the promise resolves/rejects for all callers at once.