Scaling MySQL – - Up or Out? Panel @ UC

April 16th, 2008 by Keith Murphy Leave a reply »

I would recommend that you download the video of this!! Sheeri posted it here.

The numbers in parentheses are Alexa rankings.

Moderator – Kaj Arno

(1317) Monty Taylor – MySQL

(905) Matt Ingenthron – Sun

(39) John Allspaw – Flickr

(13) Frank mash – Fotolog

(9) Domas Mituzas – Wikipedia

(6) Jeff Rothschild – Facebook

(2) Paul Tuckfield – YouTube

Question One: Number of MySQL servers

MySQL one master/three slaves

Sun four servers

Flickr 166

Fotolog 37

Wikipedia

Facebook 1,800 (900m/900s)

YouTube


Question Two: Number of MySQL DBAs

MySQL 1/10th

Sun 1.5

Flickr 0 (normally 1)

Fotolog 1

Wikipedia Technical Team

Facebook 2

YouTube 3

Question Three: Number of Web Servers

MySQL 2

Sun 160

Flickr 244

Fotolog 70

Wikipedia

Facebook 10,000

YouTube

Question Four: Number of Memcached servers

MySQL 2

Sun 8

Flickr 14

Fotolog 40

Wikipedia 79

Facebook 805

YouTube

Question Five: Version of MySQL

MySQL 5.23-2rc

Sun 5.0.21

Flickr 5.0.51

Fotolog 4.11

Wikipedia 4.4

Facebook 5.0.44

YouTube 5.0.24

Question Six: Operating System on Server

MySQL Fedora

Sun OpenSolaris

Flickr Linux

Fotolog Solaris 10

Wikipedia Fedora/Ubuntu

Facebook Fedora/RHEL

YouTube SuSE 9

Question Seven: What happens if a server fails?

Flickr – Federated setup for failover. Can loose any one side of the shard.

Wikipedia – if a master fails they replace with slave

Facebook – archive binlogs, promote slave

Fotolog – mount snapshots?

Youtube – SAN; shards with a master and multiple slaves so they promote slaves

Question Eight: What is Their Crucial Scaling Technology

Facebook doesn’t use SAN – they do use RAID 10 with 2.5″ drives

Fotolog — UltraSparc T1 — excellent master UltraSparc T2 — excellent slave — uses SAN

This was interesting to me. Frank (Fotolog) said they use a SAN to keep things manageable (only two dbas with the second one just hired). Facebook says they don’t use SAN because they didn’t want to limit themselves.
Next they got off on discussion about power. This varied quite a bit with YouTube pretty much dismissing power concerns. Of course Frank from Fotolog then pointed out that when they (Fotolog) want to expand in a datacenter — the datacenter has to get Google’s approval…hmmm..no wonder Google isn’t worried about it. Fotolog and Facebook were very much in favor of power savings. I think there is more than just saving a little power, you get cooling and space (if smaller of course) savings.

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38 comments

  1. Thanks for publishing this, I was looking for the notes. These numbers are fun.

  2. Frank says:

    Hi,

    Thanks for writing this. A few corrections:

    1. We have 37 database servers. The number posted is the number of instances.

    2. In the following sentence, Facebook should be replaced with Fotolog, as it was me who made the point :)

    “Of course Facebook then pointed out that when they (Facebook) want to expand in a datacenter — the datacenter has to get Google’s approval…hmmm..no wonder Google isn’t worried about it.”

    3. Our second DBA has yet to start :)

    Thanks

  3. Frank says:

    Ughhh, typo in my last comment:

    We have 37 database servers. The number posted is the number of databases.

    thanks!

  4. admin says:

    Thanks for the updates Frank. Sorry about the mistake. I updated the numbers.

    Keith

  5. Bob Jones says:

    They should be running IIS/Windows/MSSQL. Scales better.

  6. I’m sorry, but where is the video you are talking about?

  7. So Facebook is built on Rails? I can’t even fathom what their burn rate must be what with the employees, the perks, and the unholy number of web servers.

  8. database server count: twenty :)

    thats for wikipedia

  9. Who mentioned rails and where? Facebook is built on php.

  10. Artem, I was joking at the Rails theory of throwing more servers at a problem. Facebook has an insane number of servers and MySQL instances based on their approximate pageviews.

  11. admin says:

    Updated with link to video.

  12. Mark says:

    10,000 database servers for Facebook!? At a rough guess they would get 30,000 DB transactions per second… Having 10,000 servers seems a bit over the top don’t you think?

  13. Flickr || 166 || 244

    Maybe I missed something, but does this mean that Flickr requires only 244 (or 410 = 244 + 166?) servers to work?

    The _whole_ Flickr with its millions of photos?!

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