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ONE MILLION! (2011) (whatsapp.com)
33 points by vitorsr on Aug 26, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


I bet that's an effective job ad. I have no idea of the significance of this news. (But I'm glad to hear Erlang is/was still in use.)


When WhatsApp got acquired, it was huge news due to the small size of their team, and that their backend was mostly Erlang.

It created a massive wave of interest in Erlang.


Curious, this article seems to be translated (properly, not automatically) for me.


Same here! It feels awkward though to read about tech in Dutch.


It's been a long time since I saw 'apenstaartje' spelled out somewhere.


You can change the language from top right corner.


1 million tcp connection is that possible? I am not an expert just thinking about the maximum port number how this could be possible ?


You can identify the connection by the local port, remote port, remote IP triplet. That gets you many, many connections.


I believe, also local IP address, as a machine may have multiple network interfaces with different IP addresses. At least it's something that I've read being used for a demo of simultaneous one million network connections.


What are the factors that made this a hard problem? Isn't having 1,000,000 open TCP connections kind of similar to having a 1,000,000 row key-value database? As long as it fits in RAM it doesn't seem too terrible.

You could even do the TCP protocol in userspace and literally use a key-value database to store all state, I think.


The problem with TCP is usually that you also have send buffers, of data that the client hasn’t acked, and receive buffers of data that the user space process hasn’t read yet. That state is a lot larger than just a tuple stored in a database.


Naive question, is freebsd actually a big factor in this capability (compared to linux)? I'd imagine that erlang(/beam) is the biggest contributing factor. But this is coming from someone who hasn't used freebsd



This post is from 2011 and requires post update


While things might have changed and improved at the back-end but this is impressive in 2021, makes it even more impressive in 2011 IMO




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