Change Is Difficult: Especially So for the Big Search Folks
September 25, 2018
There is a pretty good reminder that plumbing is an issue. Most users of smart search just assume that systems will continue to work. Hey, it is 2018. This Moore’s Law stuff, free services, and nifty new “old” phones are slam dunks.
Not quite.
I found “The Woes of Incremental Resource Drains in Big Systems” useful because it offers practical information. Most of the content snagged by my monitoring systems return what I consider marketing craziness.
The write up explains that an attempt to implement a necessary change can go off the rails. It’s like magic. One day Gmail or Amazon doesn’t work. Hand waving. Tweets. Then the problem is solved and forgotten.
The write up explains:
Let’s say you have a tier of 100,000 web servers. Every one of them opens one connection to your database. That connection is shared with all of the concurrent hits/code executing on those web servers. It just gets multiplexed down the pipe and off it goes. Then, one fine day, someone decides to write a change that makes the web servers open four connections to the database. They’ve invented this new “pooling” strategy, such that requests grab the least-busy connection instead of always sharing the single one. It’s supposed to help latency by n% (and get them a promotion, but let’s not get into that now).
Do the math. Dead system.
Worth remembering because as certain companies become like the timesharing systems of the past, excitement will be inevitable. Some can be hidden. Some will surface in unexpected ways.
Bing, Facebook, Google, and maybe Amazon may face this type of challenge more often than one believes.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2018
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