[Van-pm] July 20th -- Kevin Scaldeferri

[Helen Cook]

When: 7:30 PM, Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speaker: Kevin Scaldeferri

Topic: How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl

This presentation discusses the challenges of building complex services
that can handle very high query rates with low latency and high
availability. Overture, the sponsored search division of Yahoo!, has
developed a number of systems that have successfully scaled over several
orders of magnitude in both data volume and query rate, and Scaldeferri
will discuss the ideas behind some of these. General topics covered will
include:

    * Caching using local and distributed caches
    * When and how to distribute your application across multiple
      machines
    * Use of asynchronous communication techniques to increase
      throughput and ensure acceptable response times

Scaldeferri also discusses the interplay between different levels of
abstraction, from high-level business logic, to practical Perl
programming, to low-level OS and hardware behavior, and how all of these
affect the design and architecture of such systems.

Bio: Kevin Scaldeferri is a lead developer at Yahoo!'s sponsored search
division, Overture, where he has spent the last three years taming an
ever-growing Perl code base that currently serves over one billion web
requests a day. His professional interests include programming languages
and software development practices. Outside work, he enjoys cooking,
reading, modern art, and "challenging" music.