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Stabilizing the npm registry
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C J Silverio
February 11, 2015
Programming
2
380
Stabilizing the npm registry
How npm went from a car fire to a very boring service with a very boring uptime.
C J Silverio
February 11, 2015
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Transcript
stabilizing the registry
C J Silverio director of engineering, npm @ceejbot
This is the story of a plucky package registry named
npm
scaling problem manifesting itself as a stability problem
"scaling" capacity to meet growing demands
"At scale" huge demand & lots of data
"stability" not falling over under normal demand
What's normal demand?
129K packages 239 GB package tarballs 40 million pkg dls/day
1500 req/sec, peak 3200
"Legacy" Anything you've put into production
this is the story of a legacy system becoming more
flexible
None
January 2013 20K packages .5 million dls/day
Oct 2013 44K packages 108 million dls/month 3.6 million dls/day
None
our plucky little registry had to change
step 1: CDN Put Fastly.com in front of the registry
cache rules everything around me
step 2: tarballs get them out of couchdb
tarballs are huge! couch runs better without them base64 decoding
is work.
None
January 2014 60K packages 6+ million dls/day
step 3: visibility are things going wrong? what's going wrong?
reactive monitoring monitor deeply fix things quickly
proactive monitoring self-healing (also things don't break)
monitoring is unit testing Add monitoring after every outage
visibility is a prerequisite but not a solution
act on what monitoring and metrics reveal
step 4: redundancy several CouchDBs! reads, writes, & replication
fewer responsibilities for each piece isolates errors
step 5: automation ansible no server is special
June 2014 Superficially similar.
June 2014 80K packages 10 million dls/day
step 6: simplification now that it's not on fire we
can modify at leisure
None
Nov 2014 105K packages 28 million dls/day peak
50/50 AWS region split no AWS-specific magic Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty
Fastly: geoloc + varnish haproxy + CouchDB nginx + a
filesystem
where's the node?
registry 2 electric boogaloo with 500% more node
None
haproxy + node services couchdb ➜ postgres redis for caching
nginx + filesystem
more complicated more flexible & redundant more scaling dials to
turn
excited about postgres ad-hoc queries are fun
scaling node is exactly like scaling everything else
Understand system get visibility cool down hot spots add redundancy
npm client <3 npm install -g npm@latest
npm loves you