<story><title>How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework</title><url>https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/asynchronous-task-scheduling-at-dropbox</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanworl</author><text>&amp;quot;To avoid this situation, there is a termination logic in the Executor processes whereby an Executor process terminates itself as soon as three consecutive heartbeat calls fail. Each heartbeat timeout is large enough to eclipse three consecutive heartbeat failures. This ensures that the Store Consumer cannot pull such tasks before the termination logic ends them—the second method that helps achieve this guarantee.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Neither this or the first method guarantees a lack of concurrent execution. A long GC pause or VM migration after the second check could allow the job to get rescheduled due to timeout. The first worker could resume thinking it still had one heartbeat left to execute before giving up on the job and it could&amp;#x27;ve already been handed out to another worker in the meantime.</text></comment>
<story><title>How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework</title><url>https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/asynchronous-task-scheduling-at-dropbox</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonpurdy</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t meant to take away from the article, but it makes me sad to see such awesome people building and writing about really cool bespoke solutions. It&amp;#x27;s obvious that Arun knows their stuff and is able to communicate it clearly.&lt;p&gt;The sad thing is that Dropbox Product has so heavily dropped the ball that users like myself (from back in 2009) have switched away in droves over the past few years.&lt;p&gt;I understand that Dropbox core functionality wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been enough to multiply the valuation of the company to what investors expected. But it would have been nice to not jam collaboration features into the product and mess up the simple, platform-native UI with it&amp;#x27;s current abomination. I&amp;#x27;d pay $10&amp;#x2F;mo forever if I could get the 2010-esque Dropbox Mac client and sync service back since it&amp;#x27;s way better than anything else (especially iCloud).</text></comment>