Which day?
by
Albinofrenchy
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· Score: 5, Interesting
From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?
-- "A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes."
-Mahatma Gandhi
32 items per second? Wow!
by
mOoZik
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't mean to be a KW (Karma Whore), but that is a staggering amount. Looking at it from a geek perspective, their system has to be such to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous surfers and dozens of simultaneous buyers. They clearly have managed to scale-up their operations in such a way that does not negatively impact the operation of their site to the detriment of sales. Way to go, Jeff & Co!
Re:32 items per second? Wow!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'll let you in on a little secret -
Amazon.com's codebase was C (now most likely migrated to C++, to take advanatge of things lik OOP among other reasons). It consisted of a gazillion modules which compiled to give you ONE BINARY, called obidos - check out the URL then you'll see what I'm saying. This one binary is then tied to Apache, and then fed out to their 500+ webservers. But the beauty of it is there redundancy measures. At any given time there are 3 copies the binary, a, b & c. a = The latest code. b = yesterday's stable build. c = another stable build. In case there's a bug in some build, they simply have to flip the switch to get an up and running site. It was great, but the part that's a BITCH is developing this stuff. Imagine having to re-compile all of Amazon, just to FIX A BLASTED TYPO. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
Re:32 items per second? Wow!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's another secret: Amazon is mostly migrated to a better system, called Gurupa (any page with 'gp/' in it), where thigns are actually modular and more maintainable. Obidos will eventually be removed. The redundancy measures are completely different now too.
(yeah, I know, not actually a secret).
Profitability?
by
jacobcaz
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder what the profit on those 2.8 million items was? It would be interesting to know if it was just a huge pile of loss leaders or bigger ticket items (which might shed some interesting light on the economy and holiday season in general).
I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.
This is great news...maybe. I would just like more context.
Amazon will rule the world.
by
AndreyF
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Not only that, most of the pages on the site are either encrypted or customized (via datamining), or both. I wonder what kind of servers they're running?
Re:Amazon will rule the world.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The customization takes place using "macros" embedded in the HTML/XML of their web pages. These macros are actually C functions, which are called at runtime on the webserver - which runs a single binary called obidos.
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
I don't mean to be a KW (Karma Whore), but that is a staggering amount. Looking at it from a geek perspective, their system has to be such to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous surfers and dozens of simultaneous buyers. They clearly have managed to scale-up their operations in such a way that does not negatively impact the operation of their site to the detriment of sales. Way to go, Jeff & Co!
A blog like any other.
I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.
This is great news...maybe. I would just like more context.
Not only that, most of the pages on the site are either encrypted or customized (via datamining), or both. I wonder what kind of servers they're running?
Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.
Someone's evidently lost their sarcasm detector, or is relatively new to /., because Amazon tried to patent online shopping several years ago.