Hybrid Content Feed Delivery Mechanism for Scalability

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Solution Overview

Problem

Existing content feed systems face scalability issues due to high fan-out and skew in content production and consumption rates, leading to increased latency and resource expenditure, as they struggle to efficiently choose between push and pull strategies for content delivery.

Innovation Solution

The system analyzes the content-producing and content-consuming rates of each producer-consumer pair to selectively choose between push and pull strategies, materializing contents in advance for lower-rate producers and retrieving them at query time for high-rate producers, thereby optimizing system load and scalability.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Loss of time

If a push strategy is used to deliver content from producer to consumer, then content delivery latency is reduced, but system load increases due to high fan-out and skew in content production rates

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecontent delivery latencyVSAvoidsystem load
Core Design Contradiction:
Loss of timeVSProductivity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies local quality by making the delivery strategy specific to each consumer-producer pair rather than using a uniform approach. The system analyzes individual production and consumption rates for each pair and selects push or pull strategy locally, optimizing performance for each relationship while avoiding unnecessary system load from applying push universally.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #3Local quality

Solution Approach 2:

The system dynamically selects between push and pull strategies based on real-time analysis of production and consumption rates. This dynamic adaptation allows the system to respond to changing conditions, using push when it benefits latency without permanently committing to a fixed strategy that would increase system load.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #15Dynamics

2Productivity

If a pull strategy is used to deliver content from producer to consumer, then system load is reduced, but content delivery latency increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvesystem loadVSAvoidcontent delivery latency
Core Design Contradiction:
ProductivityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies local quality by making the delivery strategy specific to each consumer-producer pair rather than using a uniform approach. The system analyzes individual production and consumption rates for each pair and selects push or pull strategy locally, optimizing performance for each relationship while avoiding unnecessary system load from applying push universally.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #3Local quality

Solution Approach 2:

The system dynamically selects between push and pull strategies based on real-time analysis of production and consumption rates. This dynamic adaptation allows the system to respond to changing conditions, using pull when it reduces system load without permanently committing to a fixed strategy that would always increase latency.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #15Dynamics

3Reliability

If content feeds are constructed to include all producers and consumers, then feed completeness is improved, but scalability deteriorates due to wide fan-out and high skew

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvefeed completenessVSAvoidsystem scalability
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSAdaptability or versatility

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies local quality by customizing the delivery strategy for each consumer-producer pair based on their specific rates. This allows the system to maintain complete feeds for all users while scaling efficiently, as each pair is handled according to its own characteristics rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach that would limit scalability.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #3Local quality

Solution Approach 2:

The system segments the content delivery problem into individual consumer-producer pairs, analyzing and optimizing each pair separately. This segmentation allows the system to handle wide fan-out and high skew by treating each relationship independently, maintaining feed completeness while improving overall system scalability.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #1Segmentation

Data Source

PatentEP2542979B1Mechanism for supporting user content feeds
Publication Date: 2015.01.14 YAHOO INC
  • EP2542979B1 patent drawingFigure 1~2
  • EP2542979B1 patent drawingFigure 3
  • EP2542979B1 patent drawingFigure 4

AI summary

In one embodiment, for each one of one or more content producers, access a content- producing rate at which the content producer produces one or more items of content; and for each one of one or more content consumers, access a content-consuming rate at which the content consumer consumes one or more items of content. For each one of a plurality of consumer-producer pairs, wherein the consumer-producer pair comprises one of the content consumers and one of the content producers, and the content consumer follows the content producer, select between a push strategy and a pull strategy for delivering one or more items of content from the content producer to the content consumer based on the content-consuming rate of the content consumer and the content-producing rate of the content producer.