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Rick Reed - WhatsApp: Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users

iX

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Rick Reed, WhatsApp software engineer
  • Linked in the descriptionSlides on SlideShare

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

30K views11 years ago2 recommendations

Distributed systemsSystems programmingConcurrency and parallelismScaling and large-scale architectureOperating systems

Rick Reed discusses how WhatsApp scaled its messaging platform to hundreds of millions of users using FreeBSD and Erlang.

Slides: slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspecting-freebs… iXsystems is a leading provider of Open-Source server and storage solutions. Some of the projects we contribute to are FreeBSD, FreeNAS, PC-BSD, etc. The content in this video may not reflect the views of iXsystems as a whole. To learn more about our company, head on over to our website: ixsystems.com MeetBSD California is the premier BSD conference in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since its inception in 2008, MeetBSD California has been held every two years in Silicon Valley, bringing together BSD community members from all over the region and around the world. For more information visit meetbsd.com

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently cite this talk as a prime example of achieving massive scale with a small team and optimized infrastructure.

felixgalloon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users”

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: link to this video
View on Hacker News

ddeckon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App”

…ur 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. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: link link to this video Slides: link There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone for users that want to use the pc as the primary client (with the phone optionally accessing the DB on the pc in the same way that the desktop client does for the phone). Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market. Edit: Sli…
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WestCoastJustinon Hacker News • Mentions

On ““RNG broken for last 4 months””

There was a talk + slides about WhatsApp FreeBSD usage 1, 2. At around 23:50 in the video, Rick Reed talks about slide #17, they say they are running 9.1 - 9.3, and looking at 10.1 (not in a hurry as 9 works for them). 1 link to this video 2 link
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ignoramouson Hacker News • Mentions

On “People who run BSD”

> no big player took to developing cool things on top. Just one data-point, but WhatsApp engineering was adamant that FreeBSD was a key precursor that allowed them to scale 2m+ connections per host on their (rather beefy) boxes: link to this video > It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant. True. I've seen many promising projects die/stagnate at the hands of unpopularity, *BSDs wouldn't be the first. Sigh.
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