Keeping Instagram Up with Over a Million New Users in Twelve Hours
Article Summary
Instagram's Android launch brought 1 million new users in 12 hours. Here's how their infrastructure team kept the lights on during hypergrowth.
The Instagram engineering team shares their battle-tested playbook for handling explosive traffic spikes. This 2012 post reveals the monitoring tools and database strategies that prevented downtime during their Android app launch.
Key Takeaways
- Statsd provided 10-second delayed realtime stats for instant diagnosis
- Memcached boxes hit 50k req/s, becoming the main bottleneck
- New Redis read-slaves deployed in under 20 minutes during traffic spikes
- PGFouine analyzed PostgreSQL logs to identify and cache heavy queries
- Open sourced node2dm after delivering 5 million push notifications
Critical Insight
Instagram scaled to handle massive user growth by combining realtime monitoring, rapid read-slave deployment, and targeted query optimization.
