High-volume computing (On Clustering Part I)

A long way coming, I started my programming career as a Technical lead of an Object-Relational mapping software, Castor JDO. Concurrent programming, transaction, real-time data, data integrity, caching, distributed, clustering, scalability, load-balancing, high availability, and high-volume have always interested me since my first job. All of these are old terminologies that exist since the early days of computing. I called them the essences of Enterprise Computing. But, after years, such software is still a huge challenge and great endeavor.

High-volume
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High-volume applications aren’t new at all, but the web makes many applications becomes high-volume. It the early days, high-volume is often handled by massive computer and highly customized software. Just like water always finds its way downward, the market finds a cheaper way to do what needs to be done. As water gather in a meadow and the water level rises, it finds (or breakout) new and faster ways to go down. As high-volume applications become common, new and cheaper way are designed to handle them.

One machine
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The first method to scale is to fully utilize one machine, adding more memory, faster disk, and more CPU if the system supports it. Multi-cores, or multiple CPU system becomes common. Sun’s provides some really good resources in this area. You can being with this video Sun Nettalk (Scale)

Wait
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The second cheapest solution to scale to higher volume sometimes is to wait. Of course, it is often unacceptable in most case. But, computer is doubling its speed every 1.5 years. The market constantly introduces new technologies announced that helps increase system preformance. Who said “waiting never solve the problem?” Same apps will be running twice as fast, if you spend the same hardware cost again 18 months later. If your volume is doubling less frequently than every 1.5 years, your problem is solving itself eventually.

Cost of making software or is very expensive. The cost of spending a man month of engineer time cost the same as a decent mid-range server. One man month doesn’t really get that much done. It is especially true if the software develop cannot be resued. Good engineers are always overworked, and should be considered as limited resource. However, salary is often considered as a fixed cost to business. Sometimes management favors spending engineer time over buying hardware. Of course, acquired hardware isn’t maintenance free and incurs cost.

Division
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Division is arguable the most important aspect of high-volume computing. As you will see from the following paragraphs and later blog, high-performance often comes from the right division. The first steps are to divide different service into different machine. For example, move HTTP service out of the machine that serving mail. The second is to partition the service across nature boundary. For example, mail belongs to a heavy site to be single out onto another machine. Going deeper, you might move HTTP server that serve images server from server that serve HTML pages.

Application might also be divided according to its scaling behavior. Application that serves static information is easiest to scale. The static part can be factoring out into a different machine or a set of machine, and leave as much as CPU to the part that change frequently. Move storage into a separate machine, or dedicated hardware. Adopt multi-tiers architecture and splits each tiers into machines with high-speed network connection.

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