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z8000on Coming soon: day-long MongoDB training sessions in SF and NYC

Well I'm pretty much compelled to try at it this point. The reviews around here are pretty stellar.

Do you think that MongoDB would perform well on a shared environment like a Linode VPS? Does MongoDB have any sort of resource gotchas like "oh, you need at least 512MB RAM for the thing to even start up" or the like?

z8000on Why MongoDB thinks single server durability is overvalued

once managing to corrupt a MySQL database pretty badly.

Rare as a Himalayan Snowcock spotting!

z8000on Why MongoDB thinks single server durability is overvalued

You are making an assumption in your addendum that uggedal does not understand how tunneling works. All he did was ask how they handle security not "how does tunneling work?"

z8000on How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

Thanks for sharing that. What are you using on the backend to handle all of those AMF connections? I'm not intimate with AMF but it seems there are at least 10 server implementations that support AMF.

z8000on Why I wrote Arel by Nick Kallen

    Results 1 - 10 of 10 for flockdb

Wow. I'd like to know more about it too.

z8000on Signed and Permanent Cookies in Rails 3

1. Rails already makes things very easy. 2. The improvement was for something that (yes, subjectively) did not look overly burdensome to begin with.

z8000on Signed and Permanent Cookies in Rails 3

"A whole lot easier" Is this a joke?

z8000on Ask HN: VPS - Where should I go?

This is just my $0.02. Everything I've heard about prgmr has been positive. For me, it was that it was a tiny operation. I've been burned by this myself for consulting gigs ironically enough.

z8000on NewServers: Bare Metal Cloud

Also, random comparison of Redis performance on NewServer vs a Linode (dedicated vs VPS):

https://gist.github.com/e115e1f62f5f5bad55ee

z8000on Ask HN: VPS - Where should I go?

I am sorry but I am not familiar with the Slicehost API.

Since no one asked, I haven't really truly considered Slicehost an option for my projects. When I started researching the various options, Linode looked 2nd best by the numbers for VPS. prgmr.com looks the best but I am not sure I'd bet the farm on such a tiny operation. Slicehost is of course similar to Linode but it seems Linode gives you more bang for your buck and has nothing to do with Rackspace which in my limited foray into this hosting world seems like a good thing (but what do I know?).

z8000on How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

I'm in the same low-cost-seeking mode as you, self-funding a teeny "startup" for iPhone services (along with 1000s of other developers) including multiplayer gaming (along with 10s of others developers).

While I can get good dedicated server deals they are still too expensive to me. So I'm diving in deep to learn how to create a almost pure scale-out solution based on a larger (than dedicated) number of VPS instances. Something like

    inexpensive+commodity+more ≥ expensive+powerful+fewer

I really want to be able to have a script that watches load and dynamically adds more capacity. I'm not a fan of calling this "cloud" based but the ideas are pretty similar.

Good luck with your project! BTW, have you looked at Neo4j (which is a graph database that seems to get high marks)?

z8000on NewServers: Bare Metal Cloud

FWIW

    We do not keep any servers unused, all servers are recycled 
    and added to queue so the customers have equal rights to get 
    them... and we cannot keep them reserved because of the costs... 
    instead you should consider leasing them for longer periods 
    so you have them available.

z8000on How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

Yes, you could buffer writes. Tokyo Cabinet does this for instance as does Redis. There was an article on the mysql performance blog about Tokyo and how fsync()ing at 1Hz didn't adversely affect performance; there are other issues with TC but that's not my point.

I suppose a system where data could be lost if buffered in RAM for up to 30s could replicate to other hosts in the cluster with the (perhaps naïve) intuition that the probability of > 1 hosts going down within the same 30s interval is low -- "someone's got the data somewhere!". Of course, if they are on the same source of power... :)

One could use a consistent hashing scheme as employed in Riak and others for read operations in such a setup and thus be a bit more fault-tolerant (hand waving a bit).

This is without any hard-earned experience with this other than reading... Thoughts?

z8000on How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

True, but I don't think development versions of browsers have 75MM users at this time. Maybe in 2020 when HTML5 is ratified. :)

z8000on Coming soon: day-long MongoDB training sessions in SF and NYC

I reviewed MongoDB and really loved the feature set but the following seem like big problems to me:

Keys in the document values are stored in the document. Big keys = more space required.

No async client drivers (still true? The last time I surveyed was in November)

"It doesn't support rollback or anything like that, so you'd have to do that yourself."

Smaller problems or non-problems:

It is not durable (writes every N seconds). Granted, most "NOSQL" experiments are not strictly durable (e.g. Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc.)

4MB limit / document (I don't have values this large anyway)

32-bit host limits MongoDB DBs to 2GB total size (so use 64-bit)

Auto-sharding is in alpha, and I'm glad to see it coming. But, things like this scare me: "If a shard is down, the query will return an error." Compare that feature to something like Riak wherein multiple copies of values are stored (Riak's W, DW parameters). MongoDB with auto-sharding does not seem fault tolerant. Am I missing something on this?

Please let me know your thoughts as I do like MongoDB for its speed and query operators but the above concerns me.

z8000on Ask HN: VPS - Where should I go?

Probably to searchyc.com

http://searchyc.com/%2522ask+hn%2522+vps

I like Linode FWIW. Bandwidth pooling, good API, good resources, mostly-idle (hand-waving) quad-cores, 5 data centers, a very responsive IRC channel and forums, ability to grow/resize a linode at any time, etc.

z8000on How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

I wish there was more data offered!

Request-response, XHR, long-polling, "COMET" (blarg, I hate that moniker) when talking to the backend?

z8000on Evernote CEO Shares The Numbers that Makes Freemium Work

I suppose it depends on the thing(s) being monitored though. I certainly do not want to have 4 people for my always-on development project. I am designing the system to be as fault tolerant and self-healing as possible so I do not have to have people (read: me) awakened at 3AM with alerts.

Maybe I'm insane or overly optimistic or both. Designing things to bend and not break is really difficult and time consuming. "Thanks Captain Obvious! You are so insightful!" No, I know, but I'm going through the cutting-of-teeth ritual now so these kinds of things are on my mind.

z8000on A Rigged Game

Broderick enters "ZERO" instead of "0" for the number of players, which made me chuckle.

I suppose a more modern version of WOPR might simulate WoW.

    Number of players?
    ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FORTY TWO
    Initializing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo

z8000on Why Riak should power your next Rails app

Riak's probably not appropriate for anyone without a cluster of over a couple dozen nodes, at least.

Did you pull this out of thin air?

z8000on Evernote CEO Shares The Numbers that Makes Freemium Work

I cannot help it.

The number of things that go wrong with their text cum HTML editor does double every year (EN for OS X)!

It's really quite poorly implemented. Plain text suddenly transmogrifies into bold text with a different font, deleting a CRLF causes the current paragraph to randomly have double-spaced lines, etc.

z8000on Evernote CEO Shares The Numbers that Makes Freemium Work

I'm starting up my own tiny business and have been spending a great deal of time understanding how to optimize every part of the product infrastructure to minimize cost (to a reasonable level).

$68K per month blows my mind if the number represents monthly expenses instead of yearly given the number of active users. I've an iPhone game with over 3MM active unique users and by my math I can host a multiplayer solution for less than $800/month. Granted, my service will not be sending giant PDFs, notes, voice memos, etc. but still... What am I missing? I am not being snarky. I need to learn.

Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number? When I worked at Yahoo, the ratio of ops staff count to production server count was IMHO ridiculously high and I never understood why it was required. Sure, some redundancy and so on. Clearly I'm missing something though - what?

I'm eager to correct my misunderstandings if I'm the one off base here. Can you recommend where I might find similar (perhaps more detailed) descriptions of production environments by other companies?

z8000on Perlin Noise

Wow, 2 Ken Perlin related posts in an hour! I met Ken Perlin once very briefly and randomly and was a bit in shock when I realized who I was talking to. He was in shock that I was in shock. Nice (and very smart) guy.

z8000on MIT PhD student uses MS Paint to showcase CV

The dog creeps me out.

This looks like interesting research: http://www.squicky.org/work/sca07gtw/

Anyone know much about motion capture? Is it something that is now doable at any sort of homebrew budget levels nowadays?

z8000on Amazing Video of 3D Printer Art in Belgium

The 3d head scan to bronze statue process blew me away.

z8000on An inside look at Justin.tv (YC W07)

There is an assumption here that they do!

z8000on AppFund

touché!

z8000on Wt, C++ Web Toolkit

I tried the WSound demo at the exact same time my UPS lost power and started beeping. I nearly spit my drink out! How did they do that?! Then reality settled back in and I thought myself an idiot.

z8000on AppFund

I am skeptical because none of the areas that they are concerned with seem like they will lead to innovation. Do we need another Yelp app? It seems like that's the type of thing they would (of course) love to fund (and make money off of).

z8000on How an entrepreneur launched a mobile chat system with 18 million users

I was hoping that this was going to be a tech-talk about scalability given the title!