60 lines
1.9 KiB
ReStructuredText
60 lines
1.9 KiB
ReStructuredText
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Design Principles
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Takahē is somewhat opinionated in its design goals, which are:
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* Simplicity of maintenance and operation
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* Multiple domain support
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* Asychronous Python core
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* Low-JS user interface
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These are explained more below, but it's important to stress the one thing we
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are not aiming for - scalability.
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If we wanted to build a system that could handle hundreds of thousands of
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accounts on a single server, it would be built very differently - queues
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everywhere as the primary communication mechanism, most likely - but we're
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not aiming for that.
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Our final design goal is for around 10,000 users to work well, provided you do
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some PostgreSQL optimisation. It's likely the design will work beyond that,
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but we're not going to put any specific effort towards it.
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After all, if you want to scale in a federated system, you can always launch
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more servers. We'd rather work towards the ability to share moderation and
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administration workloads across servers rather than have one giant big one.
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Simplicity Of Maintenance
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-------------------------
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It's important that, when running a social networking server, you have as much
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time to focus on moderation and looking after your users as you can, rather
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than trying to be an SRE.
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To this end, we use our deliberate design aim of "small to medium size" to try
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and keep the infrastructure simple - one set of web servers, one set of task
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runners, and a PostgreSQL database.
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The task system (which we call Stator) is not based on a task queue, but on
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a state machine per type of object - which have retry logic built in. The
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system continually examines every object to see if it can progress its state
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by performing an action, which is not quite as *efficient* as using a queue,
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but recovers much more easily and doesn't get out of sync.
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Multiple Domain Support
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-----------------------
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TODO
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Asynchronous Python
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-------------------
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TODO
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Low-JS User Interface
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---------------------
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