“Building OpenDNS Stats” at Velocity 2009/06/23

I just finished talking about OpenDNS’s stats system at Velocity and I think it went rather well.  I got the official Allspaw and Hammond seals of approval so my life is pretty much complete.

Here are the slides: http://rcrowley.org/talks/opendns_stats.pdf

Questions I expected and wasn’t asked because I only left 8 seconds for questions:

1. When you catch std::bad_alloc, why do you shutdown the process instead of just freeing some memory?  I chose to exit and let supervise restart the process because I might have run out of memory due to a slow memory leak.  Starting fresh is safer and doesn’t have any downsides.  In production, each node tends to restart every day shortly after midnight, UTC as rows for the new day start being allocated.
2. What’s up with the waffle at the end?  Wednesdays are Waffle Wednesdays at OpenDNS.  We’re hiring.

I’ll update later with the video link when O’Reilly posts.  Moving pictures with sound!  http://blip.tv/file/2286154/ and embedded below.