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System Architecture (and it’s subfield Software Architecture) is a discipline which is surprisingly poorly covered. In a sense, it is still more an art than a science, and usually requires somebody intimately familiar with practical systems, to tell what’s to do and what’s to avoid when building a system.

IT Hares have lots of experience in both Software Architecture and more general System Architecture, and are trying to share their knowledge (and more importantly, their feelings) about them.

All Not so Common Wisdoms about System Architecture, page 2:

Allocator for (Re)Actors with Optional Kinda-Safety and Relocation

posted by

Quote: “‘Safe with relocation’ mode will allow us to eliminate dreaded ‘external fragmentation’ – which tends to cause quite a bit of trouble for long-running systems”
Another Quote: “For a long while, I have been a strong proponent of message-passing mechanisms over mutex-based thread sync for concurrency purposes”
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The Importance of Back-of-Envelope Estimates

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Quote: “trying to optimize out a 3e-7 performance hit is very rarely worth the trouble.”
Another Quote: “With 4S/4U boxes having typical MTBFs of 3–5 years, the next question we should ask ourselves, is “Hey, will we really be able to write software which crashes much more rarely than that?””
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Scaling Stateful Objects

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Quote: “it is DB which is usually The Bottleneck™ – it means that we’re saving this enormous amount of load, exactly where it really matters.”
Another Quote: “as discussed above, the real-world task is always about scaling the whole system, including database; and in this regard Stateless-App-based systems exhibit significant problems.”
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Production Crashes. Post-factum Debugging. Logging. Replayable Deterministic Re(Actors)

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Quote: “I’ve seen game companies with hundreds of thousands of dollars lost per hour of unplanned server downtime.”
Another Quote: “deterministic debugging is by far the best thing I have seen for production debugging.”
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Determinism: Requirements vs Features

posted by

Abstract: Apparently, in practice there is big difference between cross-platform determinism and same-executable determinism, both in abilities they can provide, and from implementation complexity point of view
Quote: “Cross-platform determinism is the strictest definition of determinism I know; not surprisingly, there are quite a few factors which can break it”
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