Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Stabilizing the npm registry
Search
C J Silverio
February 11, 2015
Programming
2
370
Stabilizing the npm registry
How npm went from a car fire to a very boring service with a very boring uptime.
C J Silverio
February 11, 2015
Tweet
Share
More Decks by C J Silverio
See All by C J Silverio
The economics of package management
ceejbot
4
1.5k
The future of (javascript) modules (in node)
ceejbot
1
290
Keeping JavaScript safe
ceejbot
3
440
ceej's how to solve it
ceejbot
6
760
work-life balance at npm
ceejbot
5
790
hash functions and you!
ceejbot
2
350
The accidental noder
ceejbot
2
140
Design Patterns & Modularity in the npm Registry
ceejbot
3
180
Monitoring on a budget
ceejbot
2
290
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
コードに語らせよう――自己ドキュメント化が内包する楽しさについて / Let the Code Speak
nrslib
5
980
💎 My RubyKaigi Effect in 2025: Top Ruby Companies 🌐
yasulab
PRO
1
130
Language Server と喋ろう – TSKaigi 2025
pizzacat83
2
660
少数精鋭エンジニアがフルスタック力を磨く理由 -そしてAI時代へ-
rebase_engineering
0
130
イベントソーシングとAIの親和性ー物語とLLMに理解できるデータ
tomohisa
1
160
テスト分析入門/Test Analysis Tutorial
goyoki
11
2.7k
技術懸念に立ち向かい 法改正を穏便に乗り切った話
pop_cashew
0
740
OpenTelemetryで始めるベンダーフリーなobservability / Vendor-free observability starting with OpenTelemetry
seike460
PRO
0
160
External SecretsのさくらProvider初期実装を担当しています
logica0419
0
230
TSConfigからTypeScriptの世界を覗く
planck16
2
1.3k
Parallel::Pipesの紹介
skaji
2
870
Doma で目指す ORM 最適解
nakamura_to
1
160
Featured
See All Featured
Keith and Marios Guide to Fast Websites
keithpitt
411
22k
Faster Mobile Websites
deanohume
307
31k
Java REST API Framework Comparison - PWX 2021
mraible
31
8.6k
4 Signs Your Business is Dying
shpigford
183
22k
ReactJS: Keep Simple. Everything can be a component!
pedronauck
667
120k
Facilitating Awesome Meetings
lara
54
6.4k
The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes
chrisshort
48
50k
The Art of Delivering Value - GDevCon NA Keynote
reverentgeek
14
1.5k
The Power of CSS Pseudo Elements
geoffreycrofte
76
5.8k
Done Done
chrislema
184
16k
Building Better People: How to give real-time feedback that sticks.
wjessup
368
19k
Stop Working from a Prison Cell
hatefulcrawdad
269
20k
Transcript
stabilizing the registry
C J Silverio director of engineering, npm @ceejbot
This is the story of a plucky package registry named
npm
scaling problem manifesting itself as a stability problem
"scaling" capacity to meet growing demands
"At scale" huge demand & lots of data
"stability" not falling over under normal demand
What's normal demand?
129K packages 239 GB package tarballs 40 million pkg dls/day
1500 req/sec, peak 3200
"Legacy" Anything you've put into production
this is the story of a legacy system becoming more
flexible
None
January 2013 20K packages .5 million dls/day
Oct 2013 44K packages 108 million dls/month 3.6 million dls/day
None
our plucky little registry had to change
step 1: CDN Put Fastly.com in front of the registry
cache rules everything around me
step 2: tarballs get them out of couchdb
tarballs are huge! couch runs better without them base64 decoding
is work.
None
January 2014 60K packages 6+ million dls/day
step 3: visibility are things going wrong? what's going wrong?
reactive monitoring monitor deeply fix things quickly
proactive monitoring self-healing (also things don't break)
monitoring is unit testing Add monitoring after every outage
visibility is a prerequisite but not a solution
act on what monitoring and metrics reveal
step 4: redundancy several CouchDBs! reads, writes, & replication
fewer responsibilities for each piece isolates errors
step 5: automation ansible no server is special
June 2014 Superficially similar.
June 2014 80K packages 10 million dls/day
step 6: simplification now that it's not on fire we
can modify at leisure
None
Nov 2014 105K packages 28 million dls/day peak
50/50 AWS region split no AWS-specific magic Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty
Fastly: geoloc + varnish haproxy + CouchDB nginx + a
filesystem
where's the node?
registry 2 electric boogaloo with 500% more node
None
haproxy + node services couchdb ➜ postgres redis for caching
nginx + filesystem
more complicated more flexible & redundant more scaling dials to
turn
excited about postgres ad-hoc queries are fun
scaling node is exactly like scaling everything else
Understand system get visibility cool down hot spots add redundancy
npm client <3 npm install -g npm@latest
npm loves you