Poor Man's Social Network: Consistently Trade Freshness For Scalability

Xie, Zhiwu; Liu, Jinyang; Van de Sompel, Herbert; van Reenen, Johann; Jordan, Ramiro

Poor Man's Social Network: Consistently Trade Freshness For Scalability

dc.contributor.author	Xie, Zhiwu	en
dc.contributor.author	Liu, Jinyang	en
dc.contributor.author	Van de Sompel, Herbert	en
dc.contributor.author	van Reenen, Johann	en
dc.contributor.author	Jordan, Ramiro	en
dc.date.accessioned	2012-05-04T19:34:09Z	en
dc.date.available	2012-05-04T19:34:09Z	en
dc.date.issued	2012-06	en
dc.description.abstract	Typical social networking functionalities such as feed following are known to be hard to scale. Different from the popular approach that sacrifices consistency for scalability, in this paper we describe, implement, and evaluate a method that can simultaneously achieve scalability and consistency in feed following applications built on shared-nothing distributed systems. Timing and client-side processing are the keys to this approach. Assuming global time is available at all the clients and servers, the distributed servers publish a pre-agreed upon schedule based on which the continuously committed updates are periodically released for read. This opens up opportunities for caching and client-side processing, and leads to scalability improvements. This approach trades freshness for scalability. Following this approach, we build a twitter-style feed following application and evaluate it on a following network with about 200,000 users under synthetic workloads. The resulting system exhibits linear scalability in our experi-ment. With 6 low-end cloud instances costing a total of no more than $1.2 per hour, we recorded a peak timeline query rate at about 10 million requests per day, under a fixed update rate of 1.6 million new tweets per day. The maximum staleness of the responses is 5 seconds. The performance achieved sufficiently verifies the feasibility of this approach, and provides an alternative to build small to medium size social networking applications on the cheap.	en
dc.identifier.citation	Xie, Z., Liu, J., Van de Sompel, H., van Reenen, J., and Jordan, R. 2011. Poor Man's Social Network: Consistently Trade Freshness For Scalability. Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Web application development (Boston, MA, USA, 2012).	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10919/18668	en
dc.language.iso	en_US	en
dc.publisher	USENIX Association	en
dc.relation.hasversion	https://www.usenix.org/conference/webapps12/poor-mans-social-network-consistently-trade-freshness-scalability	en
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/	en
dc.subject	consistency	en
dc.subject	scalability	en
dc.subject	social network	en
dc.subject	feed following	en
dc.subject	distributed systems	en
dc.subject	database	en
dc.subject	1-copy serialization	en
dc.subject	eventual consistency	en
dc.title	Poor Man's Social Network: Consistently Trade Freshness For Scalability	en
dc.type	Article	en