All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 12, 2018

They can run applications in Sweden, serve end users across the Nordics with lower latency, and leverage advanced technologies such as containers, serverless computing, and more. We help Supercell to quickly develop, deploy, and scale their games to cope with varying numbers of gamers accessing the system throughout the course of the day.

AWS 124

AWS Cloud Games Serverless 124

The Morning Paper

MAY 28, 2019

The goal is to produce a low-energy hardware classifier for embedded applications doing local processing of sensor data. Of course analog signalling comes with a whole bunch of challenges of its own, which is one of the reasons we tend to convert to digital. One such possible representation is pure analog signalling.

Energy 52

Energy Hardware Efficiency Architecture 52

The Morning Paper

MARCH 3, 2020

It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of the control plane for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS): the Physalia database that stores configuration information. This work is latency critical, because volume IO is blocked until it is complete. This paper is a real joy to read.

Database 106

Database AWS Network Design 106

Alex Russell

MARCH 6, 2021

A then-representative $200USD device had 4-8 slow (in-order, low-cache) cores, ~2GiB of RAM, and relatively slow MLC NAND flash storage. Not as much as we'd like, of course, but the worldwide baseline has changed enormously. Hardware Past As Performance Prologue. There are differences, of course, but not where it counts.

Performance 124

Performance Network Cache Metrics 124

Highly Scalable

SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

Historically, NoSQL paid a lot of attention to tradeoffs between consistency, fault-tolerance and performance to serve geographically distributed systems, low-latency or highly available applications. A database should accommodate itself to different data distributions, cluster topologies and hardware configurations. Data Placement.

Database 213

Database Latency C++ Scalability 213

Alex Russell

APRIL 29, 2021

Chrome has missed several APIs for 3+ years: Storage Access API. For heavily latency-sensitive use-cases like WebXR, this is a critical component in delivering a good experience. is access to hardware devices. This allows customisation and use of specialised features without custom, proprietary software for niche hardware.

Media 145

Media Games Education Engineering 145

Alex Russell

OCTOBER 22, 2017

It simulates a link with a 400ms RTT and 400-600Kbps of throughput (plus latency variability and simulated packet loss). Simulated packet loss and variable latency, however, can make benchmarking extremely difficult and slow. Our baseline, then, should probably trade lower throughput/higher-latency for packet loss.

Performance 68

Performance Benchmarking Network Mobile 68

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 6, 2020

This might be very different for your company, of course, but that’s a close enough approximation of a majority of customers out there. Estimated Input Latency tells us if we are hitting that threshold, and ideally, it should be below 50ms. Thanks to Tim Kadlec, Henri Helvetica and Alex Russel for the pointers!

Performance 145

Performance Cache Network Metrics 145

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 7, 2019

Estimated Input Latency tells us if we are hitting that threshold, and ideally, it should be below 50ms. On the other hand, we have hardware constraints on memory and CPU due to JavaScript parsing times (we’ll talk about them in detail later). Both of them are great introductions for diving into Webpack.

Performance 103

Performance Cache Metrics Network 103

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 11, 2021

This might be very different for your company, of course, but that’s a close enough approximation of a majority of customers out there. Estimated Input Latency tells us if we are hitting that threshold, and ideally, it should be below 50ms. Thanks to Tim Kadlec, Henri Helvetica and Alex Russel for the pointers!

Performance 145

Performance Cache Media Metrics 145

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Here's some output from my zfsdist tool, in bcc/BPF, which measures ZFS latency as a histogram on Linux: # zfsdist. Tracing ZFS operation latency. Appliance manufacturers hire kernel engineers to develop custom features, including storage appliances. Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C

Virtualization 76

Virtualization AWS Engineering Hardware 76

Alex Russell

JULY 14, 2021

Here, native apps are doing work related to their core function; storage and tracking of user data are squarely within the four corners of the app's natural responsibilities. Hardware access APIs, notably: Geolocation. Fixing mobile won't be sufficient to unwind desktop's increasingly negative dark patterns, of course.

Google 121

Google Mobile Engineering Internet 121