THE VIDEO SHELF · scaling messaging infrastructure
Rick Reed - WhatsApp: Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users
Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.
Why HN readers recommended it
Pointed to as a rare look at how a tiny engineering team ran WhatsApp's massive scale on FreeBSD and Erlang.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- iX
- Topic
- scaling messaging infrastructure
- Format
- talk
- Level
- advanced
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 4
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2015–2019
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
I can personally guarantee to you from direct current experience that there is nothing particularly solved about running services for even 50 million users. Go watch this: [VIDEO]
felixgallo on Hacker News · 2015-09
In Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M UsersIt's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. …
ddeck on Hacker News · 2016-05
In Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.