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Rick Reed - WhatsApp: Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users

iX · talk · Watch on YouTube

Distributed systemsLinux & open-source ecosystemsCloud, DevOps & reliability

What it is

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Pointed to as a rare look at how a tiny engineering team ran WhatsApp's massive scale on FreeBSD and Erlang.

  • 2 people recommended it
  • 2 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2019

What HN commenters said

  1. “Go watch this”

    Shows real challenges of running services at tens of millions of users

    felixgallo, 2015-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users”

  2. “Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed”

    2014 talk on WhatsApp's FreeBSD/Erlang stack and scale

    ddeck, 2016-05 · Recommendation · in “Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: whatsapp, freebsd, erlang, scalability, rick reed

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