Tag Archives: distributed systems

Retries Can Kill You

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Matthias

In a large-scale distributed system, it’s inevitable that some requests will fail. Even if your collaborating systems work perfectly, sooner or later you will experience temporary network issues and other intermittent errors. That’s why a lot of people try to … Continue reading →

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DNS Over HTTPS

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Matthias

With much of the web switching to HTTPS and at least some people becoming more concerned about privacy, DNS has recently come into the spotlight because it provides an ISP with the ability to monitor which websites a user visits. … Continue reading →

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Preventing Cascading Failure

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Matthias

With the advent of reactive programming and frameworks like Netflix’ Hystrix, classic stability patterns like Nygard’s Circuit Breaker Pattern have entered mainstream software development. The circuit breaker is used inside your clients to cut the connection to a collaborating system … Continue reading →

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Sharing Files Revisited

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Matthias

It’s amazing how sometimes problems solve themselves. Since my last article, I got a new home router (a FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7320) that nicely solves the problem of accessing network devices with dynamic addresses even without Zeroconf.

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Sharing Files With Android Devices

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Matthias

Occasionally I want to transfer a file from my Linux desktop machine to one of my Android-based devices via my home network. Shouldn’t be a problem, there are lots of networking protocols for this, right? In practice, many solutions you … Continue reading →

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Into the Future with IPv6

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Matthias

2011 may not be the year when IPv4 addresses finally run out, but the reserves are running low enough to warrant large IPv6 transition projects. Access providers and domain hosters will see the effects first because the growth of their … Continue reading →

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Berlin Buzzwords Conference 2010

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Matthias

This week I attended Berlin Buzzwords Conference 2010, a two-day event aimed at software developers. The conference offered two tracks, one on search and the other one on NoSQL systems. Typical attendees seemed to be MacBook-wielding, twittering lifestyle geeks, often … Continue reading →

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Using TCP for Low-Latency Applications

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Matthias

Last week I ran into a nasty little problem while implementing an application with soft real-time requirements. I was aiming at 1 ms or less for a TCP-based request-response roundtrip on a local network. Should be trivial, but why did … Continue reading →

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