Google on today’s massive Google+ spam influx: “We ran out of disk space”

http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/09/google-on-massive-google-spam-influx-we-ran-out-of-disk-space/

by suneliot • 15 years ago

67 41 15 years ago

staunch• 15 years ago

Running out of disk space is probably the single biggest category of server problem that occurs.

benologist3• 15 years ago

I still have this happen, and every time I tell myself right, today I'm going to put in a warning system that'll stop this happening .... and then I clear up a ton of space and move on.

HTTP.sys logging has been a real pain in my ass, every time I deploy a new server I forget to disable it and we do so much traffic it fills the drive completely overnight.

jackowayed• 15 years ago

Sounds like you need to automate setting up a new server

benologist3• 15 years ago

That also doesn't quite happen enough to make it a priority!

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Or at least automate the logging process. 5-minute log monitor that compresses old logs, and maybe moves them off the system onto a cloud server once space starts to run out, while also e-mailing the people responsible.

ChuckMcM6• 15 years ago

Interesting. Given the minimum size of a Colossus cluster I find the explanation Vic gives unsatisfying. That being said I'm pretty impressed with the overall product, it is the best attempt yet to unseat Facebook, and I predict it will if Facebook can't come up with a credible response quickly.

The killer feature is that its blended with Gmail, and since a lot of people keep gmail open all the time it means you get notified and you see stuff. Not as common to keep one's facebook page open.

mlinsey• 15 years ago

since a lot of people keep gmail open ... Not as common to keep one's facebook page open.

Do you have data on this? I'd think it would be close, if not the opposite.

Edit for clarification:

In my social circles, what you said is probably true, but I know many others use FB messages more than email (any email, not just gmail). Facebook has more pageviews total, and Facebook has probably around 3X as many active users (I couldn't find numbers at the same point in time, Gmail was at around 200 million last November as per the WSJ, Facebook was at 500 million last July and 750 million last week)

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that G+ notifications in Gmail (and on Google Search!) is hugely powerful, and will mean G+ engagement among its users will stay quite high. But when you talk about "unseating" Facebook, you have to first come to grips with just how entrenched it is, compared to social networks that rose and fell before it. It is so entrenched that Gmail integration alone will not be enough - Facebook is substantially bigger than Gmail.

ChuckMcM6• 15 years ago

You are correct in that I was generalizing when I should not have been.

I've used Google Apps for work and since a lot of communication comes through email that means Gmail is open (or at least getting notifications with the talk gadget). I would not be surprised if you were correct that many folks leave Facebook open all the time.

carbonica5• 15 years ago

How do you know "the minimum size of a Colossus cluster"? Are you a Google employee leaking information?

ChuckMcM6• 15 years ago

Former employee, no.

flyt• 15 years ago

Is this a joke? When I see people using their phones in public the #1 app, bar none, that I see open is Facebook. people are just browsing their feeds, commenting, liking, etc. This is mostly on iOS devices but increasingly on Android as the FB app has matured.

750 million people around the world use Facebook at least once a month. Of that number HALF return every single day, and 80% use it at least once a week. Facebook is a big deal that has deeply imbedded itself into the lives of many, many people. "Checking your Gmail" is a completely different kind of interaction.

craigmccaskill2• 15 years ago

Tangental but - the Facebook app on Android has done anything but mature. It's been stagnant for the last 6-8 months while the web interface has come on leaps and bounds.

At this point in time, I see no reason other than persistance of data (FB messages) to use the app.

craigmccaskill2• 15 years ago

Some quick napkin math on numbers:

If you're to believe Eric Schmidt when he says 'millions' and put that at 3 million users (being generous), guessing that each user uploads 20 megabytes of content (again, generous) thats:

3x10^6 × 20 MB

6x10^7 MB or

60TB

Sanity check or does that not seem like a lot of resources to allocate to a project of this size?

Edit: formatting

carbonica5• 15 years ago

60TB? That's about a couple grand worth of space. Why would that be a lot of space to Google?

whiskers3• 15 years ago

Even using 3TB consumer grade SATA disks you'd need 20 of them, an enclosure for 20 disks costs a lot more than a couple of grand.

starwed• 15 years ago

I don't think this has anything to do with how much content a user uploads. They specifically said that “For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications.”

So probably they had allocated some amount that made perfect sense while testing, but was too low for the full rollout that seems to (effectively) be happening now.

Maakuth• 15 years ago

Maybe some heavy logging in this field test phase could explain it? Indeed 60TB sounds like very little. I thought Google would use their GFS system to back this kind of things so the disk space wouldn't be an issue. What do I know.

ChuckMcM6• 15 years ago

Quite simply, no. But if it was notifications they were probably going through 'Chubby' [1] which is sometimes used as a scratchpad for notifications. But if you read the interview with Sean Quinlan [2] you can get a sense that 60TB is quite small.

[1] http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html

[2] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594206

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

I have on the order of six terabytes knocking around in my house. I think the chocolate factory can store a few orders of magnitude more than me before it starts to sweat.

oflannabhra• 15 years ago

So I guess "field testing" is the new beta testing? Google watered down beta by applying it to finished products to the degree that they've had to invent a new term to fill its function.

adaml_623• 15 years ago

Shouldn't there be a Beta tag on the Google Plus icon. Perhaps they left it on Gmail for so long they didn't think anybody would pay attention to it anymore.

robryan• 15 years ago

Seems today and yesterday (for me and those I have invited anyway) there has been no issue with creating an account straight away. So I'm guessing this has sent the total users on the service up pretty fast.

senthilnayagam2• 15 years ago

running out of diskspace is devops 101, it is high time these colossus startups start publishing which CMM level standard they meet

vegai2• 15 years ago

Are you joking?

senthilnayagam2• 15 years ago

no, I am pretty serious, down votes dont change reality. there are apps/services which are signing on 99.999% availability.

if after having a expertise in managing 200million+ gmail accounts, I would consider it a bad fumble at 5 million+ users

tybris• 15 years ago

Not so long ago hard disk space was abundant, then programmers realized hard disk space was abundant.

Google on today’s massive Google+ spam influx: “We ran out of disk space”

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