Explains so much

This article about Livejournal's backend explains ever so many oddities I've found with the service just visiting other people's pages there. Here, this one is my favorite:

The very bad thing about MyISAM is that a single write blocks all other writes and reads. That means if you're posting a comment, nobody else can read a comment on your cluster for the disk rotation or so it takes to post that comment. This is totally lame. With enough user clusters, however, we spread the writes out so they're minimal and the reads have enough time to catch up.

On the upside, Livejournal seems to have several very dedicated people working on the service and trying to improve it... which is always good. Posted by Reid at July 1, 2003 08:49 AM | TrackBack