Serving a billion web requests with boring code

#611 – February 02, 2025

5 million requests per day with excellent performance metrics

Serving a billion web requests with boring code
15 minutes by Bill Mill

The article describes Bill's experience building a high-traffic Medicare plan comparison website for the US government. The system, built with "boring" technology choices like PostgreSQL, Go, and React, successfully handled about 5 million requests per day with excellent performance metrics. He emphasizes that quality software can be built under government constraints by focusing on simplicity, reliability, and established technologies rather than cutting-edge solutions. The project's success was attributed to both technical decisions and an exceptional team collaboration.

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Why Aren't You Idempotent?
7 minutes by Sam Lightfoot

Idempotency is a crucial property in distributed systems where an action produces the same outcome regardless of how many times it's executed. In this article Sam discusses strategies for implementing idempotent endpoints in Apache Cassandra, including using client-supplied identifiers and timestamps, and handling counter operations. Beyond resilience, idempotency enables performance optimization techniques like request hedging, which can significantly reduce tail latencies in distributed systems.

Using the most unhinged AVX-512 instruction to make the fastest phrase search algo
about 2 hours by Gabriel Menezes

Gabriel developed a highly optimized phrase search algorithm that achieves up to 1600x performance improvement over Meilisearch. The core optimization combines several techniques: efficient token merging during indexing, smart query minimization using dynamic programming, AVX-512 SIMD instructions for fast intersection computation, and galloping intersection for highly imbalanced cases.

New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection
8 minutes by Steve Nadis

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. In this article Steve presents researchers' significant progress on the library sorting problem, which deals with efficiently organizing items in sorted order. Their new algorithm comes remarkably close to the theoretical optimal solution by combining randomness with limited historical data about past insertions. This breakthrough has important implications for data structures in computing, as it could significantly improve the performance of databases and file systems that handle billions of items.

Service Reliability Mathematics
5 minutes by Addy Osmani

Service reliability is often reduced to a simple percentage, but the reality is far more nuanced than those decimal points suggest. Let’s explore what these numbers actually mean for modern distributed systems and why understanding them is crucial for making informed engineering decisions.

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