[erlang-questions] If you make WhatsApp today...

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:

> I'd probably use the file system, then ets or dets and "roll my own" first.


To much extent, this is what WhatsApp is doing according to what I've been
able to dissect out of their talks. They use mnesia for storing meta-data,
but they use an UFS2 file system on FreeBSD to store the majority of data
and just pick it off of the disk whenever they need it. The other trick
they use is to use the clients to store the majority of data and only use
the servers as a temporary transient store until the client comes back up
and requests its missing data.

Were I to start, I'd definitely do the API modularity split as well, but
I'd probably pick postgresql as a backing store over mnesia, perhaps with
mnesia as an in-memory cache for active users. The assumption is user data
is not changing that often, and postgresql have the added value of being a
system I *know* how to operate and handle. There is much to be said for
picking technology which is tried and proven and you know how to operate.

A possible switch is Riak for the UFS2 store, but it does require the
ability to "append" to an object in Riak. Otherwise it is kind of moot to
load data, add a couple of bytes and store the object back again. Perhaps
this can be done by "chaining" documents in Riak with content addressing.


-- 
J.
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