Category: technical

• Anycast

  This week we started testing our global anycast network. We have a real-time map which shows which people are served by each location. Today we have three locations online, we hope to have 10-12 by the end of the year. The Internet is definitely not a big truck…

  Barry

  March 16, 2013

  technical

• Nginx Case Study

  A case study I worked on with Andrew Alexeev at Nginx was republished on High Scalability.  The Hacker News thread has some good conversation as well.

  Barry

  October 2, 2012

  technical

  nginx

• WordPress.com DDoS Details

  As you may have heard, on March 3rd and into the 4th, 2011, WordPress.com was targeted by a rather large Distributed Denial of Service Attack. I am part of the systems and infrastructure team at Automattic and it is our team’s responsibility to a) mitigate the attack, b) communicate status updates and details of the…

  Barry

  March 7, 2011

  servers, technical, wordpress.com

  ddos

• AMD Barcelona vs. Intel Nehalem

  We are looking at switching some of our servers from AMD Opteron Barcelona quad-core processors to the new Intel 5520 Nehalem processors. These are both 4 core CPUs, but the Intels utilize hyper-threading, so the OS sees 8 cores per CPU.  It wasn’t that long ago that the first thing you did with a hyper-threading-enabled…

  Barry

  May 22, 2009

  servers, technical

  amd, barcelona, intel, nehalem

• Keeping track of 300 servers

  Since WordPress.com broke 10 million pageviews today, I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about keeping track of all the servers that run WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, Ping-o-matic, etc. Currently we have over 300 servers online in 5 different data centers across the country. Some of these are collocated, and…

  Barry

  July 18, 2007

  scaling, servers, technical