How does Google check username availability in few millisecond during Gmail signup? - caching

I'm wondering, how does Google check username availability within few millisecond from list of 1 billion users? I want to know architecture and technology used to build username availability check service.
My thoughts
They will not be querying their database directly. They may be using cache memory but even after that it is very tough to scan 1 billion record in few millisecond without a perfect architecture.

There is no simple answer to that. It pretty much depends on architecture, technologies, bandwidth, processing power, everything. Surely there is a service specifically designed for that, which stores everything in memory, as the fastest way to work with data.

Related

Which caching mechanism to use in my spring application in below scenarios

We are using Spring boot application with Maria DB database. We are getting data from difference services and storing in our database. And while calling other service we need to fetch data from db (based on mapping) and call the service.
So to avoid database hit, we want to cache all mapping data in cache and use it to retrieve data and call service API.
So our ask is - Add data in Cache when it gets created in database (could add up-to millions records) and remove from cache when status of one of column value is "xyz" (for example) or based on eviction policy.
Should we use in-memory cache using Hazelcast/ehCache or Redis/Couch base?
Please suggest.
Thanks
I mostly agree with Rick in terms of don't build it until you need it, however it is important these days to think early of where this caching layer would fit later and how to integrate it (for example using interfaces). Adding it into a non-prepared system is always possible but much more expensive (in terms of hours) and complicated.
Ok to the actual question; disclaimer: Hazelcast employee
In general for caching Hazelcast, ehcache, Redis and others are all good candidates. The first question you want to ask yourself though is, "can I hold all necessary records in the memory of a single machine. Especially in terms for ehcache you get replication (all machines hold all information) which means every single node needs to keep them in memory. Depending on the size you want to cache, maybe not optimal. In this case Hazelcast might be the better option as we partition data in a cluster and optimize the access to a single network hop which minimal overhead over network latency.
Second question would be around serialization. Do you want to store information in a highly optimized serialization (which needs code to transform to human readable) or do you want to store as JSON?
Third question is about the number of clients and threads that'll access the data storage. Obviously a local cache like ehcache is always the fastest option, for the tradeoff of lots and lots of memory. Apart from that the most important fact is the treading model the in-memory store uses. It's either multithreaded and nicely scaling or a single-thread concept which becomes a bottleneck when you exhaust this thread. It is to overcome with more processes but it's a workaround to utilize todays systems to the fullest.
In more general terms, each of your mentioned systems would do the job. The best tool however should be selected by a POC / prototype and your real world use case. The important bit is real world, as a single thread behaves amazing under low pressure (obviously way faster) but when exhausted will become a major bottleneck (again obviously delaying responses).
I hope this helps a bit since, at least to me, every answer like "yes we are the best option" would be an immediate no-go for the person who said it.
Build InnoDB with the memcached Plugin
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/innodb-memcached.html

Working around a very heavy encryption algorithm?

I'm in the progress of building an API in NodeJS. Our main API is built in Java in which all the ids are encrypted (one example being AA35794C728A440F).
The Node API needs to use the same encryption algorithm for compatibility.
During testing of the API, I was surprised to find that it was only able to handle somewhere in the region of 25 to 40 (depending on the AWS EC2 instance I tested with) requests per second, and that the CPU was maxing out.
Digging into it, I found the issue was with the algorithm being used, specifically that it was performing 1000 md5 operations per key per encrypt/decrypt.
Removing the encryption gave me a massive increase in throughput, up to 1200 requests per second.
I'm stuck with the algorithm - it won't be possible to change without impacting many consumers of the API, so I need to find a way to work around it.
I was wondering what the most efficient way to handle this would be, keeping in mind that I need to be able to 'encrypt' or 'decrypt'?
My question isn't so much how to make the algorithm more efficient, given that I would like to avoid the 1000 md5 ops per id, but rather, an efficient of bypassing the actual encryption itself.
I was thinking of storing all the keys (up to maybe 2 or 3 million) in a map or a tree and then doing a lookup, however that would be mean lugging around 30-50MB of ids in the repository, plus consuming a lot of memory.
It sounds like, lacking any code, that a key derivation is being done on each invocation.
Key derivations are designed to be slow. Provide more information on what you are trying to accomplish and some code.
50MB of memory for cache doesn't sound that much to me... you could also use memcache (possibly AWS ElastiCache) to do the actual caching - this way it can be easily shared across multiple servers..

How do I figure out my RAM requirements for Cloud Hosting?

I'm new to everything that is 'the cloud.'
I will be developing a website/platform that will have around 15,000,000 estimated monthly visitors after the first year of production.
I'm assuming that the site will have 5 page views per visitor, and 100kb of data transfer per page.
I've contacted several cloud hosting companies, but they tell me that I need to have 'hardware requirements.'
Since I'm rather clueless about IT stuff, I'd like to know:
What are the factors that need to be analyzed in order to determine
How many servers are required
VPUs / server required
RAM / server required
Total storage / server required
Big thanks in advance!
I don't agree with the other answer as it's nearly total guesswork, as will anything you can generate yourself.
The only surefire way to know is to get some hardware, stick your application on it and run some load testing to see if you can get to the point you want to traffic wise, and with a certain amount of free overhead on the servers. Only then will you know what you need. No-one else can answer this question as every application is different. This is your application, only you can test it.
Data given wont help much in determining what numbers you want. But based on my experience I'll try to help you in analysis.
15,000,000 visits a month means 700K visits a day (assuming approx 30-35% visits are by repeat visitors).
700Kx5=3.5million page views a day.
Assuming 14 hours of active period, typical for single timezeone sites. Its 70reqs/sec.
With this big userbase few thing you surely need is a high performance DB server, with one slave.
Config of these DB server
Memory so that whole active data + indexes fits in memory (No swapping/thrashing should happen). This you need to calculate based on
what you will be storing for user and for how long.
Use some reliable storage like RAID10 (higher read/write bandwith).
Take enough storage, see that its elastic enough. (like AWS EBS).
Make frontend app server lightweight and horizontally scalable. Put them behind a loadbalancer (use software loadbalancer like nginx or HAproxy). You should be able to put as many as you go to your goal.
For loadbalacer and frontend take 4CPU, 4-8GB RAM servers.
How much each frontend can take need to be tested using a load testing method and realistic test data.
Reduce load on database/persistent using a inmemory/+persistent caches like memcached/membase/redis etc. Take a servers with 8GB and add more as you feel need.
I have not discussed about DB partitioning. Do that only when you feel the need of it. Do not over invest at start.
With 15M users a month, this setup should be enough, but again it all depends on you 1. memory footprint, 2. amount of active data
I tried to answer as much as possible. Comments on points you disagree or wanna discuss more.

Performance impact of having a data access layer/service layer?

I need to design a system which has these basic components:
A Webserver which will be getting ~100 requests/sec. The webserver only needs to dump data into raw data repository.
Raw data repository which has a single table which gets 100 rows/s from the webserver.
A raw data processing unit (Simple processing, not much. Removing invalid raw data, inserting missing components into damaged raw data etc.)
Processed data repository
Does it make sense in such a system to have a service layer on which all components would be built? All inter-component interaction will go through the service layers. While this would make the system easily upgradeable and maintainable, would it not also have a significant performance impact since I have so much traffic to handle?
Here's what can happen unless you guard against it.
In the communication between layers, some format is chosen, like XML. Then you build it and run it and find out the performance is not satisfactory.
Then you mess around with profilers which leave you guessing what the problem is.
When I worked on a problem like this, I used the stackshot technique and quickly found the problem. You would have thought it was I/O. NOT. It was that converting data to XML, and parsing XML to recover data structure, was taking roughly 80% of the time. It wasn't too hard to find a better way to do that. Result - a 5x speedup.
What do you see as the costs of having a separate service layer?
How do those costs compare with the costs you must incur? In your case that seems to be at least
a network read for the request
a database write for raw data
a database read of raw data
a database write of processed data
Plus some data munging.
What sort of services do you have a mind? Perhaps
saveRawData()
getNextRawData()
writeProcessedData()
why is the overhead any more than a procedure call? Service does not need to imply "separate process" or "web service marshalling".
I contend that structure is always of value, separation of concerns in your application really matters. In comparison with database activities a few procedure calls will rarely cost much.
In passing: the persisting of Raw data might best be done to a queuing system. You can then get some natural scaling by having many queue readers on separate machines if you need them. In effect the queueing system is naturally introducing some service-like concepts.
Personally feel that you might be focusing too much on low level implementation details when designing the system. Before looking at how to lay out the components, assemblies or services you should be thinking of how to architect the system.
You could start with the following high level statements from which to build your system architecture around:
Confirm the technical skill set of the development team and the operations/support team.
Agree on an initial finite list of systems that will integrate to your service, the protocols they support and some SLAs.
Decide on the messaging strategy.
Understand how you will deploy your service/system.
Decide on the choice of middleware (ESBs, Message Brokers, etc), databases (SQL, Oracle, Memcache, DB2, etc) and 3rd party frameworks/tools.
Decide on your caching and data latency strategy.
Break your application into the various areas of business responsibility - This will allow you to split up the work and allow easier communication of milestones during development/testing and implementation.
Design each component as required to meet the areas of responsibility. The areas of responsibility should automatically lead you to decide on how to design component, assembly or service.
Obviously not all of the above will match your specific case but I would suggest that they should at least be given some thought.
Good luck.
Abstraction and tiering will introduce latency, but the real question is, what are you GAINING to make the cost(s) worthwhile? Loose coupling, governance, scalability, maintainability are worth real $.
Even the best-designed layered app will exhibit more latency than an app talking directly to a DB. Users who know the original system will feel the difference. They may not like it, so this can be a political issue as much as a technical one.

How to create a system with 1500 servers that deliver results instantaneously?

I want to create a system that delivers user interface response within 100ms, but which requires minutes of computation. Fortunately, I can divide it up into very small pieces, so that I could distribute this to a lot of servers, let's say 1500 servers. The query would be delivered to one of them, which then redistributes to 10-100 other servers, which then redistribute etc., and after doing the math, results propagate back again and are returned by a single server. In other words, something similar to Google Search.
The problem is, what technology should I use? Cloud computing sounds obvious, but the 1500 servers need to be prepared for their task by having task-specific data available. Can this be done using any of the existing cloud computing platforms? Or should I create 1500 different cloud computing applications and upload them all?
Edit: Dedicated physical servers does not make sense, because the average load will be very, very small. Therefore, it also does not make sense, that we run the servers ourselves - it needs to be some kind of shared servers at an external provider.
Edit2: I basically want to buy 30 CPU minutes in total, and I'm willing to spend up to $3000 on it, equivalent to $144,000 per CPU-day. The only criteria is, that those 30 CPU minutes are spread across 1500 responsive servers.
Edit3: I expect the solution to be something like "Use Google Apps, create 1500 apps and deploy them" or "Contact XYZ and write an asp.net script which their service can deploy, and you pay them based on the amount of CPU time you use" or something like that.
Edit4: A low-end webservice provider, offering asp.net at $1/month would actually solve the problem (!) - I could create 1500 accounts, and the latency is ok (I checked), and everything would be ok - except that I need the 1500 accounts to be on different servers, and I don't know any provider that has enough servers that is able to distribute my accounts on different servers. I am fully aware that the latency will differ from server to server, and that some may be unreliable - but that can be solved in software by retrying on different servers.
Edit5: I just tried it and benchmarked a low-end webservice provider at $1/month. They can do the node calculations and deliver results to my laptop in 15ms, if preloaded. Preloading can be done by making a request shortly before the actual performance is needed. If a node does not respond within 15ms, that node's part of the task can be distributed to a number of other servers, of which one will most likely respond within 15ms. Unfortunately, they don't have 1500 servers, and that's why I'm asking here.
[in advance, apologies to the group for using part of the response space for meta-like matters]
From the OP, Lars D:
I do not consider [this] answer to be an answer to the question, because it does not bring me closer to a solution. I know what cloud computing is, and I know that the algorithm can be perfectly split into more than 300,000 servers if needed, although the extra costs wouldn't give much extra performance because of network latency.
Lars,
I sincerely apologize for reading and responding to your question at a naive and generic level. I hope you can see how both the lack of specifity in the question itself, particularly in its original form, and also the somewhat unusual nature of the problem (1) would prompt me respond to the question in like fashion. This, and the fact that such questions on SO typically emanate from hypotheticals by folks who have put but little thought and research into the process, are my excuses for believing that I, a non-practionner [of massively distributed systems], could help your quest. The many similar responses (some of which had the benefits of the extra insight you provided) and also the many remarks and additional questions addressed to you show that I was not alone with this mindset.
(1) Unsual problem: An [apparently] mostly computational process (no mention of distributed/replicated storage structures), very highly paralellizable (1,500 servers), into fifty-millisecondish-sized tasks which collectively provide a sub-second response (? for human consumption?). And yet, a process that would only be required a few times [daily..?].
Enough looking back!
In practical terms, you may consider some of the following to help improve this SO question (or move it to other/alternate questions), and hence foster the help from experts in the domain.
re-posting as a distinct (more specific) question. In fact, probably several questions: eg. on the [likely] poor latency and/or overhead of mapreduce processes, on the current prices (for specific TOS and volume details), on the rack-awareness of distributed processes at various vendors etc.
Change the title
Add details about the process you have at hand (see many questions in the notes of both the question and of many of the responses)
in some of the questions, add tags specific to a give vendor or technique (EC2, Azure...) as this my bring in the possibly not quite unbuyist but helpful all the same, commentary from agents at these companies
Show that you understand that your quest is somewhat of a tall order
Explicitly state that you wish responses from effective practionners of the underlying technologies (maybe also include folks that are "getting their feet wet" with these technologies as well, since with the exception of the physics/high-energy folks and such, who BTW traditionnaly worked with clusters rather than clouds, many of the technologies and practices are relatively new)
Also, I'll be pleased to take the hint from you (with the implicit non-veto from other folks on this page), to delete my response, if you find that doing so will help foster better responses.
-- original response--
Warning: Not all processes or mathematical calculations can readily be split in individual pieces that can then be run in parallel...
Maybe you can check Wikipedia's entry from Cloud Computing, understanding that cloud computing is however not the only architecture which allows parallel computing.
If your process/calculation can efficitively be chunked in parallelizable pieces, maybe you can look into Hadoop, or other implementations of MapReduce, for an general understanding about these parallel processes. Also, (and I believe utilizing the same or similar algorithms), there also exist commercially available frameworks such as EC2 from amazon.
Beware however that the above systems are not particularly well suited for very quick response time. They fare better with hour long (and then some) data/number crunching and similar jobs, rather than minute long calculations such as the one you wish to parallelize so it provides results in 1/10 second.
The above frameworks are generic, in a sense that they could run processes of most any nature (again, the ones that can at least in part be chunked), but there also exist various offerings for specific applications such as searching or DNA matching etc. The search applications in particular can have very short response times (cf Google for example) and BTW this is in part tied to fact that such jobs can very easily and quickly be chunked for parallel processing.
Sorry, but you are expecting too much.
The problem is that you are expecting to pay for processing power only. Yet your primary constraint is latency, and you expect that to come for free. That doesn't work out. You need to figure out what your latency budgets are.
The mere aggregating of data from multiple compute servers will take several milliseconds per level. There will be a gaussian distribution here, so with 1500 servers the slowest server will respond after 3σ. Since there's going to be a need for a hierarchy, the second level with 40 servers , where again you'll be waiting for the slowest server.
Internet roundtrips also add up quickly; that too should take 20 to 30 ms of your latency budget.
Another consideration is that these hypothethical servers will spend much of their time idle. That means they're powered on, drawing electricity yet not generating revenue. Any party with that many idle servers would turn them off, or at the very least in sleep mode just to conserve electricity.
MapReduce is not the solution! Map Reduce is used in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for creating the indexes out of the huge data (the whole Web!) they have on their disk. This task is enormous and Map Reduce was built to make it happens in hours instead of years, but starting a Master controller of Map Reduce is already 2 seconds, so for your 100ms this is not an option.
Now, from Hadoop you may get advantages out of the distributed file system. It may allow you to distribute the tasks close to where the data is physically, but that's it. BTW: Setting up and managing an Hadoop Distributed File System means controlling your 1500 servers!
Frankly in your budget I don't see any "cloud" service that will allow you to rent 1500 servers. The only viable solution, is renting time on a Grid Computing solution like Sun and IBM are offering, but they want you to commit to hours of CPU from what I know.
BTW: On Amazon EC2 you have a new server up in a couple of minutes that you need to keep for an hour minimum!
Hope you'll find a solution!
I don't get why you would want to do that, only because "Our user interfaces generally aim to do all actions in less than 100ms, and that criteria should also apply to this".
First, 'aim to' != 'have to', its a guideline, why would u introduce these massive process just because of that. Consider 1500 ms x 100 = 150 secs = 2.5 mins. Reducing the 2.5 mins to a few seconds its a much more healthy goal. There is a place for 'we are processing your request' along with an animation.
So my answer to this is - post a modified version of the question with reasonable goals: a few secs, 30-50 servers. I don't have the answer for that one, but the question as posted here feels wrong. Could even be 6-8 multi-processor servers.
Google does it by having a gigantic farm of small Linux servers, networked together. They use a flavor of Linux that they have custom modified for their search algorithms. Costs are software development and cheap PC's.
It would seem that you are indeed expecting at least 1000-fold speedup from distributing your job to a number of computers. That may be ok. Your latency requirement seems tricky, though.
Have you considered the latencies inherent in distributing the job? Essentially the computers would have to be fairly close together in order to not run into speed of light issues. Also, the data center in which the machines would be would again have to be fairly close to your client so that you can get your request to them and back in less than 100 ms. On the same continent, at least.
Also note that any extra latency requires you to have many more nodes in the system. Losing 50% of available computing time to latency or anything else that doesn't parallelize requires you to double the computing capacity of the parallel portions just to keep up.
I doubt a cloud computing system would be the best fit for a problem like this. My impression at least is that the proponents of cloud computing would prefer to not even tell you where your machines are. Certainly I haven't seen any latency terms in the SLAs that are available.
You have conflicting requirements. You're requirement for 100ms latency is directly at odds with your desire to only run your program sporadically.
One of the characteristics of the Google-search type approach you mentioned in your question is that the latency of the cluster is dependent on the slowest node. So you could have 1499 machines respond in under 100ms, but if one machine took longer, say 1s - whether due to a retry, or because it needed to page you application in, or bad connectivity - your whole cluster would take 1s to produce an answer. It's inescapable with this approach.
The only way to achieve the kinds of latencies you're seeking would be to have all of the machines in your cluster keep your program loaded in RAM - along with all the data it needs - all of the time. Having to load your program from disk, or even having to page it in from disk, is going to take well over 100ms. As soon as one of your servers has to hit the disk, it is game over for your 100ms latency requirement.
In a shared server environment, which is what we're talking about here given your cost constraints, it is a near certainty that at least one of your 1500 servers is going to need to hit the disk in order to activate your app.
So you are either going to have to pay enough to convince someone to keep you program active and in memory at all times, or you're going to have to loosen your latency requirements.
Two trains of thought:
a) if those restraints are really, absolutely, truly founded in common sense, and doable in the way you propose in the nth edit, it seems the presupplied data is not huge. So how about trading storage for precomputation to time. How big would the table(s) be? Terabytes are cheap!
b) This sounds a lot like a employer / customer request that is not well founded in common sense. (from my experience)
Let´s assume the 15 minutes of computation time on one core. I guess thats what you say.
For a reasonable amount of money, you can buy a system with 16 proper, 32 hyperthreading cores and 48 GB RAM.
This should bring us in the 30 second range.
Add a dozen Terabytes of storage, and some precomputation.
Maybe a 10x increase is reachable there.
3 secs.
Are 3 secs too slow? If yes, why?
Sounds like you need to utilise an algorithm like MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Wiki.
Check out Parallel computing and related articles in this WikiPedia-article - "Concurrent programming languages, libraries, APIs, and parallel programming models have been created for programming parallel computers." ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing
Although Cloud Computing is the cool new kid in town, your scenario sounds more like you need a cluster, i.e. how can I use parallelism to solve a problem in a shorter time.
My solution would be:
Understand that if you got a problem that can be solved in n time steps on one cpu, does not guarantee that it can be solved in n/m on m cpus. Actually n/m is the theoretical lower limit. Parallelism is usually forcing you to communicate more and therefore you'll hardly ever achieve this limit.
Parallelize your sequential algorithm, make sure it is still correct and you don't get any race conditions
Find a provider, see what he can offer you in terms of programming languages / APIs (no experience with that)
What you're asking for doesn't exist, for the simple reason that doing this would require having 1500 instances of your application (likely with substantial in-memory data) idle on 1500 machines - consuming resources on all of them. None of the existing cloud computing offerings bill on such a basis. Platforms like App Engine and Azure don't give you direct control over how your application is distributed, while platforms like Amazon's EC2 charge by the instance-hour, at a rate that would cost you over $2000 a day.

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