Techhawking

Found some very interesting graphs of Internet connectivity as they grew between 1969 and 2007.

Source National Science Foundation

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 throws a warning for self-signed certificate, and makes you do a couple of extra clicks to see the contents. Though some think its bad, I’m not sure what the fuss is all about. There are two reasons for the certificates. One is to encrypt the traffic, and the other to make sure no one intercepted your traffic using some kind of man-in-the-middle attack. One cant guarantee the second objective until a respected third party can sign/vouch the certificate. This is why these organizations exist.

If this is such a big issue, the right approach should be for someone to setup a free certificate registry. There are few out there today like startcom, but the browser support on such registries is currently unimpressive.

Speaking on behalf of the 99% of the Internet population who doesn’t understand the significance of SSL certificates, I think the decision Mozilla took is courageous and admirable, and other browsers should do something similar if they don’t already.

There are a lot of traceroute programs out there. This one called WinMTR was recently recommended by Akamai support during one of the troubleshooting sessions. Its based of another Linux tool called mtr (Matt’s traceroute) which is another one I had never heard off.

I liked it so much, that ended up making an enhanced web interface to it. Check it out here at Webtrace.info.

Webtrace provides extra networking information which is really helpful for folks who are trying to investigate networking issues. There are a lot of hyper links which allows them to quickly drill down into issues (like who is loosing packets).

Zoppr is a Custom Search engine which allows you to create custom Google search engine on the fly, by appending your bookmark page, wikipage, or any other kind of page with lots of interesting bookmarks/links on it. Once setup, google will search only across your bookmarks/links. For example this URL will help you search across an OPML file published somewhere on the internet http://www.zoppr.com/cse/http://share.opml.org/

If you haven’t noticed already there is a second blog which I maintain which is currently more busy than this particular blog. “Scalable web architectures” is a collection of posts about how web architectures which scale and technologies which make it happen.

Here are some of the posts on that blog

Scaling Powerset using Amazon’s EC2 and S3

Powerset could have gone the way most dot-com companies have gone, but instead they decided to try out Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) and S3(Simple Storage Service) to augment their computational needs.

P2P network scalability

Youtube is said to be pushing about 25 petabytes per month which is about 77 Gbps sustained data rate on an average. The bandwidth usage at the peaks would be even higher. Thanks to Limelight networks, Youtube doesn’t really need to scale or provision for that kind of bandwidth and based on the some reports from 2006 it had cost them close to 4 million a month back then. Youtube and services like that have to invest a lot in their infrastructure before they can really launch their service and though using shared Content delivery networks is not ideal, its probably not a bad deal. In Youtube’s case, it helped them survive until Google bought it out.

Sharding: Different from Partitioning and Federation ?

Theo Schlossnagle, the author of “Scalable internet architecutres” argues that federation is form of partitioning, and that sharding is nothing but a form of partitioning and federation. Infact, according to him, Sharding has already been in use use for a long time.

Adventures of scaling eins.de

Eins.de site serves about 1.2 million dynamic pages a day. He wrote a series of articles describing how they redesigned the site to scale for growth. I found these articles very informative with a extreemly mature discussion of the colorful world of scalability.

Session, state and scalability

If I could only give one recommendation to anyone building a brand new web application, I’d say “go stateless“. But going stateless is not the same as going session-less. One could implement a perfectly stateless web architecture which still uses sessions to authenticate, authorize and track user activity. And to complicate matters further, when I say stateless, I really mean that the server should be stateless, not the client.

Loadbalancer for horizontal web scaling: What questions to ask before implementing one.

Loadbalancers, by definition, are supposed to solve performance bottlenecks by distributing or balancing load between different components its managing. Though you would normally find loadbalancers in front of a webserver, a lot of different individuals have found other interesting ways of using it.