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Handling Flash Crowds From Your Garage

Posted by kdawson on from the to-scale-or-not-to-scale dept.

slashdotmsiriv writes "This paper from Microsoft Research describes the issues and tradeoffs a typical garage innovator encounters when building low-cost, scalable Internet services. The paper is a more formal analysis of the problems encountered and solutions employed a few months back when Animoto, with its new Facebook app, had to scale by a factor of 10 in 3 days. In addition, the article offers an overview of the current state of utility computing (S3, EC2, etc.) and of the most common strategies for building scalable Internet services."

11 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Not Flash Mobs? by penguin+king · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here I was picturing a bunch of people showing up in your garage for seemingly no reason. Still interesting to see how they handled the massive increase!

    1. Re:Not Flash Mobs? by RuBLed · · Score: 3, Funny

      And here I was thinking that it was about handling a crowd flashing for you in front of your garage...

    2. Re:Not Flash Mobs? by dredwerker · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought it was something to with actionscript.

      --
      On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
    3. Re:Not Flash Mobs? by ericvids · · Score: 4, Funny

      Question: So how DO you handle flash crowds?

      MS Answer: We don't. We'll force them to install Silverlight.

      --
      Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
    4. Re:Not Flash Mobs? by houghi · · Score: 3, Funny

      And here I was thinking that it was about handling a crowd flashing for you in front of your garage...

      You must be non-American, because in Soviet America you flash the crowd.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    5. Re:Not Flash Mobs? by MJMullinII · · Score: 2, Funny

      Nah, that's easy.

      TRUST ME, they scatter pretty easy when wheel into your driveway at 40 mph.

      The few that remain can easily be cleaned up with a fire/water hose.

      --
      "Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
  2. Where are the pix? by mcrbids · · Score: 2, Funny

    Since I can't see any pix in the area near the bottom called "Figure: DNS servers fail over very quickly when an upstream server fails" - does that mean that the flash crowd called "SLASHDOT" has taken down this part of the article called "Handling Flash Crowds..." ?

    I mean sheesh! They even mention slashdot!

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  3. Re:The method: by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hmm, you're right. Better revamp the method:

    1) Be myspace or facebook
    2) ride on the coattails of self-absorbed attention whores
    3) ???
    4) Profit!


    5) throw doggie bones to javascript noobs so that sites' users could be spammed with even more movie quizzes.(You too can be a myspace developer! Valid e-mail address and fake phone number required)

  4. Great. by ericvids · · Score: 5, Funny

    A paper on how to avoid slashdotting, posted on slashdot. /me clicks obsessively on links

    --
    Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
  5. And for those of us who speak English? by gsslay · · Score: 2, Funny

    Could someone provide a translation of the summary for those of us who speak English rather than promotional BS? .. on second thoughts, never mind.

  6. Re:Misleading pretense by argent · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's a small subset of the Facebook usership that forwards almost everything they receive to everyone they know. Pandering to that particular crowd is a Facebook developer's foremost goal, because they are the ones who will drive exponential growth, if it's going to happen at all.

    So basically Facebook selects for applications that are attractive to the kind of people who forward spam.

    Thanks for the warning.