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Erlang Factory 2014 - That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp

Erlang Solutions · talk · Watch on YouTube

Distributed systemsFunctional programmingSoftware performance & optimization

What it is

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

Why Hacker News recommends it

The go-to talk showing how Erlang let a tiny team run a massive messaging system.

  • 6 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2014, last 2022

What HN commenters said

  1. “how small their team was compared to the volume and complexity of the operation.”

    Tiny team handling enormous volume and complexity

    rdtsc, 2014-07 · Strong recommendation · in “Revisiting 1M Writes per second”

  2. “watch this talk and imagine trying to recreate that system with only a handful of server engineers”

    Specialized tech enabling a handful of engineers to run huge system

    kornish, 2017-07 · Strong recommendation · in “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users”

  3. “here is a presentation given at Erlang Factory 2014 about their goals with scaling WhatsApp”

    WhatsApp's goals for scaling to billions of users

    rbsn, 2014-11 · Recommendation · in “Yahoo Mail moving to React”

  4. “Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed”

    Interesting tech stack with huge scale on limited hardware

    ddeck, 2016-05 · Recommendation · in “Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App”

  5. “Here's a great talk from Rick Reed”

    Great talk on scaling WhatsApp's Erlang infrastructure

    otterley, 2017-03 · Recommendation · in “A comment left on Slashdot”

  6. “is a good glimpse into their own view of it”

    Glimpse into WhatsApp's own view of its early tech decisions

    dpeck, 2022-08 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: erlang, whatsapp, scalability, mnesia, freebsd, performance

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