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[NineChap System Design] Class 3.1: Web Service

Overview

Today we’ll look at 6 examples of problems associated with Web Service:

  1. how the internet works
  2. DNS
  3. Web server
  4. Music Player
  5. MP3 file
  6. 秒杀

Question 0

how to solve raido-play failures

> Failure rate  = % user who can't listen to music properly

> = # user who fail to plya one song / # total users

Misson: reduce failure rate.

How does server identify a user?

If a server uses Cookie to identify unique users, the result might be > real users.

However, if server uses IP address, the result might be < real users.

How to collect data for failure rate

Version 1

Log:

  1. user send a log to server when it visits
  2. user send another log after it plays a song
  3. we can identify users who failed to play a song

In fact, everything should be logged, including play, pause, switch song, refresh etc.

Version 2

User login are, in fact, automatically logged when user visits. Thus user ONLY have to send log after it plays music.

Summary

  1. define failure rate
  2. user cookie to identify user
  3. use log to collect failure data
  4. analysis pattern of failure againt date/time

Question 1

the process of playing music

  1. Prepare
  2. Send DNS request
  3. Prepare DNS reply
  4. Send DNS reply

  5. Process DNS reply

    -

  6. Send webpage request

  7. Prepare webpage reply
  8. Send webpage reply

  9. Process webpage

    -

  10. Request music player

  11. Prepare music player
  12. Send music player

  13. Process music player

    -

  14. Request MP3

  15. Prepare MP3
  16. Send MP3
  17. Play MP3

What is process Music Play?

Local browser will do rendering, flash decoding etc. If any point of this 17 steps went wrong, the music-play fails.

Is there a system/browser default Music Play?

HTML player is, but flash player is not. So the flash module have to be requested every time.

Real data: failure rate 20%

In practise, the real failure rate is 20%. Which is:

  1. 8% DNS
  2. 5% Web
  3. 5% MP3
  4. 2% Player

Question 2

fix DNS problem

First of all, how to find out DNS failures? There are 2 ways. First way, help desk do it. Second way is to use the Desktop app to help detect the host address.

Step 1. HOSTs hijack

Some users' host file can modified by competitors.

  1. ping the website url
  2. modify host file manually or by desktop app

Step 2. ISP

Each ISP have different DNS service. Eg. CSTNET fails to update the latest DNS, after a server change.

After this step, DNS failure rate fall from 8% to 1%. Why still 1%? Some companies bans music play in company web.

Question 3

fix the web problem

Highest failure rate:

  1. 3pm office hour
  2. 9pm highest bandwidth nation-wide

Solution 1, reverse proxy

Reverse proxy w/ more servers. Reverse proxy acts like a load balancer.

Reverse proxy is a type of proxy server that retrieves resources on behalf of a client from one or more servers. These resources are then returned to the client as though they originated from the proxy server itself.

Common uses for a reverse proxy server include:

  1. Load balancing

    act as a “traffic cop,” sitting in front of your back-end servers and client requests. Try to maximizes speed and capacity utilization while ensuring no one server is overloaded.

    If a server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers.

  2. Web acceleration

    can compress inbound and outbound data, as well as cache commonly requested content

    also perform additional tasks such as SSL encryption to take load off of your web servers

  3. Security and anonymity

    By intercepting requests headed for your back-end servers, a reverse proxy server protects their identities and acts as an additional defense against security attacks.

Solution 2, reduce size of web page

  1. simplify javascript files
  2. compress images (lower dpi)
  3. merge large images to 1 image (less requests)
  4. lazy loading (Pinterest uses it a lot)

Solution 3, more cacheable pages

Change dynamic webpages to static pages. The advantage of this is:

  1. more search engine friendly.
  2. more cache friendly.

Summary on caching

Caching can happen at place Number 1, 2 and 3:

AT Number 4, we can add more servers. Number 3, reverse proxy. Number 2 is caching within the ISP network, which avoids requesting info again from backend. Number 1 is front-end browser cache.

After this step, Web failure rate fall from 7% to 4%. Why still 4%? Well, these failure is mainly from the junk users created by marketing.