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Moving to another shard

Posted on 11/10/2007, 1:25 am, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

I must be moving to another shard, having outgrown my current one. Its a manual operation.


Flickr tells me they’re moving my stuff around
Incidentally, I can’t sign out. Or view the main page. Or any of the groups I’m subscribed to. Its completely locked. But it does take under-15 minutes… (at least for the load I have – ~11,500 images).

Update: Read John Allspaw‘s comments at the HighScalability link to this blog post. He’s in-charge of operations, and an all round nice guy, and great presenter.

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Related posts:

  1. High Scalability
  2. Flickr’s upgraded shard
  3. Conferences and co-presenters
  4. Vice-advertising moving to various Internet mediums
  5. Capacity Planning For LAMP or more Flickr-innards
  • http://kitchensoap.com john allspaw

    You hit your shard at the precise moment it was being migrated, so the account gets temporarily locked from changes to make sure all is good before and after the move, consistency-wise. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s

    The amount of time to migrate a user obviously has something to do with how large their account is, but in some ways it’s more dependent on how busy current shard or target shard is, at the time.

    So I have to ask: in the end….was it moved in less than 15 minutes, or more ?

    –john

  • http://www.bytebot.net/ byte

    hey john! it wasn’t a problem at all, just good to know that this happens from time to time. it was moved in under-15 minutes, and from the time i grabbed the screenshot, it was only another 6.5 minutes before i got access back to my account again.

    quick operation, and continue making flickr rock!

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