Improving the Responsiveness of the Document Detector
In our previous blog posts (Part 1, Part 2), we presented an overview of various parts of Dropbox’s document scanner, which helps users digitize their physical documents by automatically detecting them...
View ArticleMemory-Efficient Image Passing in the Document Scanner
In our previous blog posts on Dropbox’s document scanner (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3), we focused on the algorithms that powered the scanner and on the optimizations that made them speedy. However,...
View ArticleOptimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency
This is an expanded version of my talk at NginxConf 2017 on September 6, 2017. As an SRE on the Dropbox Traffic Team, I’m responsible for our Edge network: its reliability, performance, and...
View ArticleImproving Document Preview Performance
Introduction Ever open a file on dropbox.com, or click a shared link your coworker sent you? Chances are you didn’t need to download the file to see it—you saw it right in the browser. This is the work...
View ArticleMigrating from Underscore to Lodash
Modernizing the front-end stack The core Dropbox web application is 10 years old and used by millions of users per day. Hundreds of front-end engineers across multiple cities actively work on it....
View ArticleDropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network
In this post we will describe the Edge network part of Dropbox traffic infrastructure. This is an extended transcript of our NginxConf 2018 presentation. Around the same time last year we described...
View ArticleCross shard transactions at 10 million requests per second
Dropbox stores petabytes of metadata to support user-facing features and to power our production infrastructure. The primary system we use to store this metadata is named Edgestore and is described in...
View ArticleAutomating Datacenter Operations at Dropbox
Introduction As a company that manages our own infrastructure we need to be able to rapidly install new server capacity and ensure that the equipment entering our production environment is highly...
View ArticleFinding Kafka’s throughput limit in Dropbox infrastructure
Apache Kafka is a popular solution for distributed streaming and queuing for large amounts of data. It is widely adopted in the technology industry, and Dropbox is no exception. Kafka plays an...
View ArticleEnhancing Bandaid load balancing at Dropbox by leveraging real-time backend...
Layer-7 load balancing (LB) is a core building block to scale today’s web services. In an earlier post, we introduced Bandaid, the service proxy we built in house at Dropbox that load balances the vast...
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