Lessons for Big Systems

Lessons

Take load from the DB

• Finally the DB is the bottleneck.
• There is only one DB (cluster), but there can be hundreds of CPUs (web server) and caches (memcache server).
• Let the CPUs work. 10 web server CPU cycles are better, than 1 DB CPU cycle.
• Aim at 0,1 DB operations per web page by average.
• Make it F5-safe. No DB operations for page reloads. No DB for views.

Avoid SQL

• Keep all live data in memory.
• Store only for persistency, not for report generation.
• Use a quick storage, storing 50.000 items per sec is possible
• DB != SQL, there are quicker interfaces
• The index is always in memory. That's what SQL DBs are good for.
• But there are other indexes as well.

External IDs

• Do not use DB IDs externally. Map all IDs.
• Use memcache to map external IDs to internal (often DB) IDs.
• Use memcache as a huge hashtable.
• External IDs may be strings. After the mapping continue with numbers internally.

DB search loves numbers

• Everything you search for must be indexed.
• Avoid indexes on TEXT, VARCHAR. INSERT with index takes significantly longer for text.
• You may store text in the DB, but do not search for it.
• You may spend some CPU to map text IDs to numbers for the DB.

100,000 concurrent

• Imagine 1% of your users are doing the same thing in an instant.
• If it affects online users, then each task is x 100,000.
• If it affects all users then everything is x 1-10 Mio.
• Anything must be at at least 1000/per sec.
• Do maintenance all the time. There will never be a time of the day where load is so small, that you can cleanup something. Cleanup permanently.

Memcache every business object

• No object is constructed from the DB.
• Everything is buffered by the cache.
• Code with real interfaces, which can be cache-enabled later.

Code for the speed

• Code for the cache. It is there. It is essential. No way to pretend it is not just for the "beauty" of the code.
• Write beautiful cache-aware code.

Memcache frontend data

• Parsing template costs much CPU.
• Cache generated HTML fragments.

Do not overload the cache

• Not more than 10 memcache requests per script.
• If you expect many items, say a mailbos with many messages, then put a summary into a list (mailbox) object even though the same information is in the individual messages.

No statistics on the live system

• Occasionally they want statistics. Don't do it live.
• Take snapshots, take the backup. Process it somewhere else.
• Make statistics offline.

Simple SELECTs

• Use only simple SELECTs on indexed columns
• Forbidden keywords: JOIN, ORDER BY
• Structure and code must guarantee small DB results.
• Sort in the code not in the DB.
• If you really need aggregated data, then aggregate permanently. Do not aggregate on demand.

Basics and Trivialities:

Distribute everything

• Do not rely on a single server for a task.

Check all input

• Check ALL input.
• Not only query params are input.
• Cookies, HTTP header fields are also input.

SQL injection

• SQL-escape all data in SQL strings.
• Use prepared statements and variables.

Framework

• Use a real programming language.
• Use a compiled language, because the compiler eliminates errors.
• You will have errors which will wake you at night. So, reduce errors by any means, even if you like script languages.
• Simple deployment of script languages won't work anyway in the long run, because you will switch on caching and you will have to invalidate the script cache for deployment.