How to end the Fail Whales? With Blue Whales.

[ Thanks to Jason Perlow for this link. ]

"Twitter's problems cannot be solved in a massive scale out distributed systems manner. When you are dealing with systems that are hitting a live database and performing millions of row inserts at any given time, you are going to go beyond the limits of what off-the-shelf client/server hardware can accomplish.

"Before I joined IBM in September of 2007, I had just completed a project for a large government agency that needed a system that could accomplish approximately 5,500 database row inserts and reads per second, or approximately 18 million transactions per week. And as a customer requirement, we had to do it with COMMODITY HARDWARE. Read as, Intel Chips and Linux.

"The heart of the "beast", as those of us referred to it, was comprised of 4 Unisys ES7000-based Oracle 10g RAC nodes, each using 256GB of RAM and sixteen dual-core Intel Xeon processors, and the most sophisticated, high-performance Cisco 10Gbps Ethernet switching that money could buy which was available between all the main clustered and load balanced tiers of the system -- Web, J2EE Application Servers, Messaging Queue and Database."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Look Ma! A Drive-In Theatre for Ants!(Dec 31, 2008)
• Final Shutdown: Still Crazy After All These Years(Dec 16, 2008)
• Slicing up Sun(Dec 04, 2008)
• Giving Thanks to Linux and Open Source(Nov 17, 2008)
• Linux Magazine: Sinning with Windows, There's no Bagels at the end of this Fast(Oct 14, 2008)
• Surviving the Recession With Free Linux Distributions(Oct 13, 2008)
• Android -- It's not about Sex, Excitement, or Cool(Sep 29, 2008)