hungrybeaver
Expert Member
I'm sure most of us are familiar with IAmA - aka Ask Me Anything - posts on reddit.com. Some of them have had quite a lot of attention in World media since it was started. Anyway, the reddit sysadmins have decided to do an IAmA fielding questions specifically aimed at technology and what/how makes reddit work, as well as what it's like being a sysadmin for a site that gets so much traffic.http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/
Heres a snippet:
Thought this would be an interesting read
Heres a snippet:
-What kind of bandwidth does reddit use?
A lot. Akamai takes a huge chunk off our shoulders, but it looks like at peak yesterday it was 924.21 MBits/sec.
-What is the approximate rate of database growth and what's the approximate size of the DB now?
We have several databases. Their aggregate size is 2.4 TB. I don't know the growth rate, but I think it's a couple GB per week
-What is the most surprising thing you found out about the infrastructure of reddit when you got access to it?
How small it was. We've pretty much only grown in app servers since I got here. That is largely the result of more people being logged in (since non logged in traffic only hits Akamai's cache).
-Have you guys considered opening up some internal sysadmin-related stuff to the community? For example, Wikipedia makes their [1] nagios, [2] ganglia, and [3] SOPs and technical documentation freely available to the community. As far as I know, we don't have access to the majority of this stuff.
I didn't know that about Wikipedia. Neat. We'll look into it.
-What is the single biggest technical challenge you've come across in your duties at reddit?
alienth has had a lot more challenges thrown at him. For me, it's been mostly the big parts of our infrastructure breaking in the middle of the day (cassandra, postgres replication, memcached). Luckily, it wasn't all on the same day.
-What is your favorite little utility that people probably wouldn't know about?
I <3 pv. Also, in my time at Rackspace, ls -1U was of tremendous use. (please folks, do not put 8 million files in a single directory!)
-What is your preferred OS to work on?
I use OS X.
-What's your favorite beer?
Blue Moon
-Thanks for doing this
You're welcome
Thought this would be an interesting read