How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
Another interesting detail is that this is roughly the 4th iteration on the FriendFeed backend since we launched 17 months ago. If you look at the the graphs at the bottom of Bret's post, you can see that our previous system was about to die -- average pageview latency had increased from about 135ms to 260ms in less than a month! (not a good trend) This new design also accommodates some important upcoming features that would have been problematic in the old system.This experience reinforces my belief that it's better to be quick than brilliant. If we had wasted a lot of time trying to build some really smart, super-scalable system right from the start, it would have inevitably been over-optimized for the wrong things, since the product and requirements have changed quite a bit since launch. By continually rebuilding the system, it stays relatively simple and close to our actual needs (plus it incorporates everything we learned from the previous iterations).