background preloader

Quora technology

Facebook Twitter

Quora (Quora) (19) Quora Infrastructure: Which Linux flavor does Quora use? Why. (19) Python Web Frameworks: What is the best Python web app framework. (19) Python Web Frameworks: What is the best Python web app framework. Quora’s Technology Examined. Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook. It is not surprising that, with all the smart people using this smart tool, there are many pondering on how it works so well. The NoSQL boffins scratch their heads and ponder such questions as, “Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc?

“. In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. Components Of Quora The general components that make up Quora are… The last point, the super-fast auto-complete search-box, is one of the defining features of Quora. What’s Cooking Under That Hood? The Search-Box Speedy Queries Nginx. The Significance of Quora’s LiveNode Framework | Haywire. I still run into people who like and/or use Quora but still think of it as simply a “Q&A website.” I have to say this again — Quora’s question and answer feature is just the tip of the iceberg. To the average consumer, yes, Quora is a robust service. That’s great. But, there’s more to Quora than the pretty interface. I’d highlight two characteristics specifically that truly make Quora a cutting-edge technology company: One: Behind the Q&A activity, Quora may be undertaking a massive semantic web project, where it encourages proper grammar, long and thoughtful answers, and site structure to tag pages with rich meta data to train its machines to learn language.

Two: Quora’s own internal development of frameworks, specifically LiveNode (LN) and WebNode2 (WN2), put this company in another class of technology endeavors. Briefly, Quora created LN and WN2 to help solve a technical problem it faced. Right now, we don’t know much about LN and WN2. Why did Quora choose Python (over PHP and others) for its development. From nodejs to python frameworks to Ruby on Rails. How Quora Supercharges Its Site By Optimizing For The 99th Percentile ⚙ Co. Site speed has a quantifiable effect on user experience, it impacts everything from your site's search optimization to the number of page views per visit. But many of the ways you'd increase speed involve compromising the product--something we didn't want to do at Quora. So when we set off to qualitatively improve our LiveNode framework, which handles the live updating of pages that have already been loaded, we first had to rethink what we meant by “fast.” Average page load time is a convenient measurement, and that's where a lot of people apply their fixes.

But we also use the 99th percentile of page load time to represent what we care about improving: the bad experiences. It's not the fast page loads you remember--it's that one really slow page load that hurts. Our previous solutions for improving site speed were cutting features, but that’s not ideal. Perhaps the oldest solution to increasing performance, known as vertical scaling, is to simply purchase faster hardware. Project Notes. How Quora Supercharges Its Site By Optimizing For The 99th Percentile ⚙ Co.