Speeding Up Massive PostgreSQL Joins with Common Table Expressions

Bluesky recently saw a massive spike in activity in response to Brazil’s ban of Twitter. As a result, the AT Proto event firehose provided by Bluesky’s Relay at bsky.network has increased in volume by a huge amount. The average event rate during this surge increased by ~1,300%. Before this new surge in activity, the firehose would produce around...

Bluesky recently saw a massive spike in activity in response to Brazil’s ban of Twitter. As a result, the AT Proto event firehose provided by Bluesky’s Relay at bsky.network has increased in volume by a huge amount. Before this new surge in activity, the firehose would produce around 24 GB/day of traffic. After the surge, this volume jumped to...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been building out server-side short video support for Bluesky. The major aim of this feature is to support short (90 second max) video streaming at a quality that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg for us to provide for free. In order to stay within these constraints, we’re considering making use of a video CDN that can...

In Part 1 of this series, we tried to answer the question “who do you follow who also follows user B” in Bluesky, a social network with millions of users and hundreds of millions of follow relationships. At the conclusion of the post, we’d developed an in-memory graph store for the network that uses HashMaps and HashSets to keep track of the...

I recently shipped a new revision of Bluesky’s global AppView at the start of February and things have been going very well. The system scales and handles millions of users without breaking a sweat, the ScyllaDB-backed Data Plane service sits at under 5% DB load in the most intense production workloads, and things are going great. You know what...