Bandaid – Dropbox service proxy | Hacker News Reader

Bandaid – Dropbox service proxy

blogs.dropbox.com

106 pointsgtirloni22 comments

Here [1] is a good article on the "random pick 2" idea in case anyone is interested. The paper is definitely worth reading too.

It's definitely one of my favorite techniques that I keep in my "toolbox". Really simple, but not (at least to me) intuitive.

[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2012/01/17/two-random.html

There's also a more mathematically rigorous paper on the random-pick-2 topic in the references section of the Dropbox blog post -- https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook2...

Yeah, sorry I wasn’t clear but that’s the paper I think that is worth reading. Thanks for linking directly.

The justification for using LIFO (vs FIFO) queues for requests is interesting: at no/low load it makes no difference, while at high load the requests least likely to time out get serviced first.

Is that a common architectural decision in reverse proxies or queuing systems in general?

In queuing theory, it's well known that choosing the request with lowest service time first will result in lowest waiting time on average across the requests.

This is usually not done because it can starve the larger jobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_job_next

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory#Service_discip...

Interesting. I wonder if that choice would lead to a noticeable impact on perceived latency (from the perspective of a human end-user) under some high-load/pathological scenario.

Nice to hear they plan to open source it. Competition in this space is heating up.

A good list is this one from the Envoy project: https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/comparison

Not familiar with the space, but definitely curious how Bandaid compares with Envoy.

Trademark lawyers took the day off?

IANAL but don't trademarks apply on specific markets? If that's so, I doubt bandaid has registered in the software market

Back in the day, there were VAX minicomputers and VAX vacuum cleaners in peaceful coexistence ...

(Not to mention the Apple music label and Apple Computer.)

Apple and Apple did not exactly co-exist peacefully:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Until the janitor unplugs the computer to run their vacuum. ;-)

Also the Linux detergents.

They do, but it's not that black-and-white, which leaves lots of room for disputes.

On this note, I can't believe that iOS the operating system and IOS the operating system have managed to get along.

Licensing agreement.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_io...

Well, TIL...

Unlikely to be a lot of risk of consumer confusion here.

You're right, I'm going to call my next software project Ford Motor Company

It looks like an attempt at reimplementing the same service at another big tech company with cough the exact same name.

One day I hope to work on a system that needs this level of optimization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com