Rick Reed
Software engineer at WhatsApp
WhatsApp
Rick Reed is an engineer/architect at WhatsApp, an early stage technology startup
founded in the heart of Silicon Valley. WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging
app, and Rick's work at WhatsApp focuses on performance and scalability of the company's server
systems.
Prior to joining the WhatsApp team, Rick was a Distinguished Engineer at Yahoo! Inc. and spent 12
years working on the company's platform infrastructure. Before Yahoo!, he was Member of Technical
Staff with SGI where he worked on interactive TV services and built SGI's disk-based
broadcast VTR system. In the early 90's, at Metaphor Computer Systems, Rick developed Metaphor’s
Internet services gateway for their distributed decision-support system. Rick launched his software
career at Aion Corporation developing the platform for the company's expert system development
environment.
Rick earned his Bachelor of Science Degree and Masters
Credentials in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Rick Reed is Giving the Following Talks
Scaling to Millions of Simultaneous Connections
In order to meet the demands of our growing user population while keeping our server footprint as small as possible, at WhatsApp we've been optimizing our Erlang-based server applications and tuning and patching the BEAM emulator and FreeBSD kernel to remove bottlenecks and improve efficiency. Our results have demonstrated the fantastic scalability of Erlang, and in this talk we will share some of the discoveries and modifications we have made along the path to supporting millions of connected users per server.
Talk objectives: To describe the speaker's work in identifying and eliminating throughput bottlenecks in the company's Erlang-based messaging systems.
Target audience: People interested in optimizing Erlang for Internet-scale communications applications.
