
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages - A deep dive
About this episode
Discord engineering goes into details of how they migrated from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, improved the performance of their reads and writes and rearchitected their backend to support the new load. It is an interesting episode lets get into it
0:00 Intro
1:50 Relational vs Distributed
7:00 The Cassandra Troubles
11:00 SnowFlake vs UUID
14:30 B+Tree
19:20 B+Tree and SSDs
25:30 LSM Trees
31:00 Hot partitions
36:00 Cassandra Garbage Collector Pauses
40:00 Changing the Architecture
45:00 The Data Services
55:00 The Migration
1:02:00 Zoned Named Spaces
1:04:00 Summary
Article here How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages
Get every episode summarized
Each time The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.
Email me new episodesFree for 3 shows. No card needed.
Hosts & guests
No transcript yet
This episode has not been transcribed. Request it and it moves to the front of the queue.
More episodes
More from The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

Caching is a cop-out
The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

How open ai agents "hacked" hugging face
The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

How a query optimization gave birth to infinite scroll
The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

Postgres is half as fast in Linux 7.0
The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser