Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Peeking Into Google

Peeking Into Google: "Google replicates the Web pages it caches by splitting them up into pieces it calls 'shards.' The shards are small enough that several can fit on one machine. And they're replicated on several machines, so that if one breaks, another can serve up the information. The master index is also split up among several servers, and that set also is replicated several times. The engineers call these 'chunk servers.'
As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box. "

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