Besides being an awesome post on both the business reason for this implementation as well as details on their solution, this is a perfect model for how companies use and contribute to open source software.
Etsy wins, Etsy customers win, and now everyone who uses Solr and ttorrent wins too.
Well, before Etsy switched to Solr we were using postgres tsearch2, and by the end of that search response times were in the 90 second range. And at the time replication wasn't part of postgres so we had a hacked up buggy in-house replicator.
I've no idea what your constraints are, but splitting the index into more manageable chunks, writing to multiple masters and reading from n slaves off each is an approach that has worked quite well for me (40 million plus records, big lumps of user generated content, total index about 100 GB iirc).
You sacrifice on the accuracy of IDF+, but gain some robustness as result too.
If the BitTorrent approach doesn't work too well, you might consider something similar. I've jotted down a few reading resources for scaling Solr++ but I should probably do a write up of the architecture I built for Boards.ie.
With ElasticSearch you wouldn't have that problem. It uses push instead pull replication ... which is also (near) real time aware. Even for peta whatever byte.
FYI mrsync is confusingly named since it doesn’t actually use the rsync algorithm it performs multicast file transfer. (The whole file is sent not just the deltas).
I’ve always thought it would be cool if someone added rsync capabilities on top of bittorrent. I’m not sure Etsy would see any benefit but I bet Twitter with their murder server deploy would.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] threadEtsy wins, Etsy customers win, and now everyone who uses Solr and ttorrent wins too.
(With postgresql, I think replicating the search index to read-only nodes is a solved problem.)
(Of course we now have more than four solr slaves.)
But IMHO, the main advantage to use Solr for search instead of Postgres is the query API.
You sacrifice on the accuracy of IDF+, but gain some robustness as result too.
If the BitTorrent approach doesn't work too well, you might consider something similar. I've jotted down a few reading resources for scaling Solr++ but I should probably do a write up of the architecture I built for Boards.ie.
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DistributedSearch
[2] http://rossduggan.ie/blog/technology/reading-list-for-scalin...
FYI mrsync is confusingly named since it doesn’t actually use the rsync algorithm it performs multicast file transfer. (The whole file is sent not just the deltas).
I’ve always thought it would be cool if someone added rsync capabilities on top of bittorrent. I’m not sure Etsy would see any benefit but I bet Twitter with their murder server deploy would.