Saturday January 22, 2005

Start Up Pains I've posted here about Technorati's misadventures in recent months: power outages, disk upgrades, data center moves and so on. In the life of a startup, these kinds of foibles seem to be just a part of growing up.

So I've empathized and enjoyed recent readings of other's mishaps. Not in celebration perhaps in feeling the bonds of shared trauma.

FlickrBlog's Growing Pains

• unbalanced load/capacity distributions
• bottlenecked queues
• non-specific system instabilities

Word to your mutha, I know that.

LiveJournal's Power-loss post-mortem

• hardware configuration/system problems that exhibited themselves as hosts that didn't came back up correctly
• MySQL databases getting hosed
• Databases tuned for speed over safety

Been there, done that.

So is it the destiny of all web service start-ups to have fabulous disasters? Probably. A lot of times, these kinds of things are predicated on having Innovative architectures, on doing some things that aren't widely known to have been done that particular way. Can you really guard against finding yourself with arrows in your back when you're out on the frontier? I don't think so. Count on the topsy turvy. It's not always fun when you're in the thick of it but if you adapt, you'll be better for it.

Of course, you could just laugh about it. Or post to your blog about it. Or both. So far, from what I've stumbled across, this is the funniest of the bunch.

10:11 pm: So far so good. Things are checking out, but we're wearing tinfoil hats. A few annoying LJ users, but nothing that's not fixable. We're going to be buying a bunch of weed on Monday so that, if this happens again, we'll just be too baked to care.

This weekend's disastrophe for me is relatively mild: sore throat and congestion. So I'm drinking tea. And laughing about it. And posting to my blog.

( Jan 22 2005, 08:42:19 PM PST ) Permalink