Miao Bingwei recently felt his hair becoming noticeably thinner.
At this rate, he estimated he'd be completely bald before he turned forty.
To prepare for the launch of "Grab the Parking Spot," the database and server work was something Chen Pingjiang specifically ordered to be prioritized.
His expertise lay in software, primarily responsible for software development, coding, and testing, using programming languages and development tools to design and develop applications.
In other words, building websites and games was fine for him, but his skills in database systems were just average.
Currently, most of Renren.com's technical department consists of software engineers and network engineers.
There's an extreme shortage of hardware engineers and database engineers.
The work of these two types of engineers cannot be completed by part-time university students; experienced professionals must be hired.
Renren.com's future development will inevitably require algorithm engineers, and even embedded engineers, cybersecurity engineers, and image processing engineers will be indispensable.
Fortunately, Chen Pingjiang arranged a new office location in Da Hangong; otherwise, it would be impossible to attract talent in a remote place like Xianlin University City.
The shortage of personnel in key positions caused Miao Bingwei to run to Wan Yuqian's office every other day, to the point where Wan Yuqian now gets a headache just seeing him.
"General Manager Miao, you've almost worn out my office's threshold."
On the sixteenth floor of Huijin Building, the new office space has been put into use.
This was also completed under the strong urging of Miao Bingwei and Wan Yuqian, as people wouldn't even consider it without an office location.
HR, administration, and finance have already moved to Huijin Building first.
The technology department was split into two.
Wen Yan is stationed at Entrepreneurship Park 202, mainly responsible for the daily maintenance of Renren.com and Renren Waimai, and providing technical support to other departments.
Miao Bingwei moved to Huijin Building to facilitate recruitment and prepare for the launch of Grab the Parking Spot.
Song Xinyue, the administrative specialist in Wan Yuqian's office, chuckled:
"General Manager Miao, don't worry. Sister Yuqian and I just got back from the job fair, we haven't even had a sip of water. Several good database engineers submitted their resumes this morning and are scheduled for an initial interview this afternoon."
Hearing this, Miao Bingwei finally sighed in relief:
"That's good, sorry, sorry. I'm really in a hurry. The boss handed such a huge task to me that I've been feeling a bit rundown lately."
Wan Yuqian pouted:
"He rushed all of us to Da Hangong at once, while he's enjoying himself at the Entrepreneurship Park. The company moved, and he didn't even lift a finger to help with renting; he's practically a hands-off boss."
Song Xinyue, born in the same year as Wan Yuqian but a few months younger, stuck out her tongue; she wouldn't dare to chime in on such comments.
Everyone in the company knew that only Wan Yuqian dared to speak about boss Chen Pingjiang like that; even Miao Bingwei, one of the earliest veterans, just hummed and didn't join the conversation.
Actually, the problem facing Miao Bingwei was both big and small.
If the servers were planned for 200,000 daily active users, things would be much simpler; just throw money at it.
But for some reason, Chen Pingjiang went crazy and made Miao Bingwei prepare for 2-3 million daily active users when planning servers and databases.
When he heard this request, Miao Bingwei's mouth gaped wide enough to swallow an egg, thinking his boss had gone mad.
But Chen Pingjiang had made up his mind and was unwavering.
A server is a hardware device or computer program responsible for providing computing resources and running applications, while a database is a software system for storing and managing data.
Servers require databases to store and manage the data needed by applications, and databases also need the computing resources provided by servers to run and manage data.
The interaction between them involves reading or writing data, which needs to be dynamically adjusted according to application requirements to ensure data accuracy and reliability.
The relationship between a server and a database can be likened to that between a waiter (server) and a chef (database).
The waiter (server) receives the customer's order request (client request), takes the order to the chef (database), the chef prepares the dishes according to the order (database operation), then hands the finished dishes to the waiter (server), and the waiter then delivers the dishes to the customer (returns the result to the client).
To improve application performance and response speed, servers and databases need to be cooperatively optimized to ensure the efficiency and stability of data access.
This requires close cooperation between server and database administrators to optimize hardware, software, and networking aspects to enhance the overall system performance and stability.
Therefore, servers and databases are inseparable.
Their relationship directly impacts the performance and reliability of information systems.
When planning and designing information systems, the relationship between servers and databases must be fully considered to ensure their collaborative work and optimization, meeting application requirements and improving overall system performance.
The moment you open your beloved goddess's QQ Zone, her thoughts and feelings, every fragrant selfie, are pulled from QQ's database and presented to you.
After the goddess says "haha, I'm going to take a bath," and you play Legend of Mir, your game data will also be recorded in the database.
However, once the number of users reaches millions, or even two to three million, many gameplay aspects change.
If these two to three million people simultaneously send messages, view profiles, and rewrite data, the data generated by these operations would shoot towards the database like a machine gun, and the database would have to become Keanu Reeves from "The Matrix" to catch every single bullet.
Currently, MySQL databases are still commonly used, similar to Android in the database world: free, convenient, and open-source.
In later generations, most large social media companies switched to NoSQL databases.
Chen Pingjiang wasn't trying to make things difficult for Miao Bingwei.
It was simply because Miao Bingwei didn't realize how much traffic such social games would generate.
Without early preparation, "Grab the Parking Spot" might crash the servers a few days after its launch.
If "Grab the Parking Spot" could crash the system, then Chen Pingjiang might as well forget about the later "Steal a Dish."
Every time players park a car, ticket a car, or steal a dish, they rewrite the database.
Even with the top mechanical hard drives of 2007, spinning at 15,000 RPM, capable of 300 read/write operations per second, two additional backups are needed for each piece of data to ensure no data loss, making a total of three copies including the original.
Given a data access intensity of two to three million users, "Grab the Parking Spot" alone might require two thousand servers, and the subsequent "Steal a Dish" might even need several thousand.
And this doesn't even account for the traffic of Renren.com and Renren Waimai.
How could Chen Pingjiang afford to burn that much money!
Tencent was already developing CKV at this time, which would later evolve into CDB, and even TcaplusDB, DBbrain.
Therefore, Chen Pingjiang wanted to do the groundwork in advance and prepare early.
Having discussed databases, let's talk about servers.
Currently, the servers used by Renren.com are leased.
The advantages are cost savings and convenient management.
After all, there's no need to spend a large amount of capital upfront to purchase servers and pay for high subsequent maintenance costs, as the service provider handles daily management and service monitoring.
However, the disadvantages are also obvious: too much reliance on the service provider's technical support and service quality, inability to fully control server security, and potential limitations from the service provider's bandwidth, storage space, and other aspects.
Purchasing servers oneself is the inevitable path!
Even if the initial investment is large, subsequent maintenance costs are high, and related technical personnel need to be hired to maintain the equipment, the greater control, stability, and freedom are incomparable to leasing.
For Renren.com, a social platform, if it still leased servers after growing big, a single outage could lead to Chen Pingjiang being cursed to death, and even malicious attacks from competitors would be extremely troublesome.
If the technology isn't up to par, more servers would inevitably need to be bought, and Renren.com's cash flow would undoubtedly be dragged down.
Tencent is quite impressive in this regard; it must be said that doing social networking well requires something special.
It had many industry-leading technologies back then.
For example, when QQ's concurrent online users went from 100,000 to 1 million, its single-machine processing capability already exceeded that of its peers by more than 10 times.
At that time, Tencent had an important technological innovation – the PCT architecture – which allowed Tencent to handle 10,000 online connections on one machine when others could only manage 1,000.
Additionally, there was the distributed storage TFS, which supported hundreds of millions of image uploads daily for QQ Albums.
When it comes to social networking, servers are an unavoidable hurdle; eventually, data centers will even need to be built.
Before traffic arrives, how to design a highly available IT architecture?
When traffic surges, how to quickly supplement server resources?
After traffic decreases, how to avoid wasting idle server resources?
These are all very troublesome matters.
This is the story of cloud computing.
Chen Pingjiang, after all, isn't a transmigrator from a novel, as if he only needs to create websites, games, and apps without any need for servers or databases, never experiencing lag or crashes.
It was precisely because Chen Pingjiang foresaw the future development path and planned ahead that he put pressure on Miao Bingwei.
He tasked him with establishing a database team and purchasing servers and setting up server rooms while staying within the financial safety line.
This instantly made both Miao Bingwei and Shu Mang very uncomfortable.
Especially Shu Mang, who was happily looking at monthly revenues of 3-4 million, now having to sink that into a sea of servers felt even worse than being killed.
Everyone questioned why they were buying servers instead of leasing, and whether a small company needed to build its own database team.
Wasn't this a waste of resources?
For this, Chen Pingjiang specifically held a high-level meeting.
At the meeting, Chen Pingjiang, contrary to his usual jovial self, transformed into a tyrant, turning the entire meeting into a one-man show, rejecting all questions.
This change caught everyone off guard.
"I know all your suggestions are for the good of the company, but please forgive me if sometimes I can't experiment according to everyone's ideas; the cost is too high. This time, I'm sticking to my guns, and in the near future, facts will prove whether the decision I made today is right or wrong."
"This is the final resolution; all departments shall execute it according to the resolution!"
(End of chapter)
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