royans

Dratz asks : Feature or a bug ?

TypePad was and probably is one of the first and largest paid blogging service in the world. In a presentation at OSCON 2007 , Lisa Phillips and Garth Webb spoke about TypePad's problems in 2005. Since this is a common problem with any successful company I found it interesting enough to research a little more. TypePad was, like any other service, initially designed in the traditional way with Linux, Postgres, Apache, mod_perl, perl as the front end and NFS storage for images on a filer. At that time they were pushing close to 250mbps (4TB per day) through multiple pipes and with growing user base, activity and data they were growing at the rate of 10 to 20% per month. Just before the planned move to newer better data center, sometime in Oct 2005, TypePad started experiencing all kinds of problems due to its unexpected growth. The unprecedented stress on the system caused multiple failures over the next two months which ranged from hardware, software, storage to networking issues.