On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 10:21 PM, Eran Sandler <[email protected]> wrote:
> I see.
> Thanks for the answer.
> How well can Causes handle load spikes? I assume its probably dependent on
> the amount of RAM the beanstalk server had, pattern of usage and the way
> jobs where used in Causes.

Causes does really well here. I don't know the usage patterns these
days, as I haven't been at the company for a while. I can only
reiterate things I've said before in some form.

The body of a typical causes job is less than 100 bytes. Workers
generally do a good job of keeping up with offered load from
interactive-type stuff. The queue almost never grows to more than a
tiny, tiny fraction of available ram.

Batch stuff can get pretty sizable. For example, facebook's API forces
updates to the "profile box" to be pushed to facebook ahead-of-time.
Once upon a time, a change to the content of this box meant making one
or more HTTP connections to facebook for each user to push the new
content[1]. Getting this done in a timely manner meant making many
millions of jobs, roughly one for each user[2]. We were doing this
routinely long before beanstalkd had persistence code at all.

By contrast, a pageview spike of, say, 100x normal traffic sustained
for twelve hours[3] would not even put a dent in the capacity.

> I think the flow-to-disk scenario is very important for real fault tolerance
> in peak scenarios.

As you say, this depends on usage patterns (including job size).

I agree that flow-to-disk can be important, for this and other
reasons. I'd love to continue discussing possible designs for the
feature.

kr

[1] I think facebook has since made API changes that drastically
reduce this problem, but that's beside the point here.
[2] I don't know the exact number of users, but it was more than 15
million a year ago.
[3] This is far beyond a realistic scenario.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"beanstalk-talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/beanstalk-talk?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to