Here’s our Frontline team at work, in our spiffy network operations center: [caption id="attachment_2043" align="alignleft" width="584"] Wayfair network operations center[/caption] Selling home goods on the internet isn’t rocket science, but if you actually wanted to send a couch to the moon, you’d want to plan for and monitor…
Summary This is a howto for consistent hashing of keys in key-value stores, with a focus on cache servers. We have code to share, in the form of a set of patches to ketama on github. At Wayfair, we have been using this code, or slightly less evolved versions of it,…
PHP APC and Handling Dynamic Inheritance Opcodes Gopal Vijayaraghavan, one of the core APC developers, has a very good write-up (APC Autofilter: The Real Story) on the consequences of static and dynamic inheritance on opcodes generated by the compiler as well as how APC handles them. If you’re familiar with…
Overview There’s storm in Wayfair! And yes, the “a” article before the word “storm” is purposely not there. When referring to “storm” at Wayfair, we do not mean a conglomerate of barometric circumstances that lead to downpours from the skies and other natural phenomena (a storm); we mean real-time computation,…
We’ve used MongoDB at Wayfair for a subset of our customer data for a while. But we’re always looking for opportunities to speed up our infrastructure and give our customers a more responsive user experience. So when we heard about a new database platform called ‘/dev/null’, we became pretty excited….
Last weekend was the inaugural run of the Northeast PHP Conference in Boston. Wayfair was a gold sponsor, so we bought t-shirts, paid for apps and beer at the Saturday night event, and also sent about 15 engineers to the event. I gave a talk on High Performance PHP, and…
A couple of weeks ago I ran a test with WebPagetest that was designed to quantify how much a CDN improves performance for users that are far from your origin. Unfortunately, the test indicated that there was no material performance benefit to having a CDN in place. This conclusion sparked…
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Inc! Magazine’s great cover story about us, including an internal poll of our favorite item from the photo shoot (results: tie between the purple dragon and giant giraffe). Unbeknownst to us, however, the story was later picked up by Yahoo!’s news feed on April…
As has been discussed at great length on this blog recently, performance is a key part of the work we do here at Wayfair. Recently, we’ve been putting a lot of extra effort into our technology developments to make our pages load faster and more reliably. One of the most…
It’s a new year and it’s time for another report on how fast (or slow) our sites are. If you are new here, our previous report looked at the average load time for our four major types of pages, as well as the 95th percentile load time. The inspiration for…
Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules…
