Back to 2008: I Helped My Dad Become the Richest Man

Chapter 69 Architectural Restructuring: The Ticket to Tens of Millions of Concurrent Servers

Xu Yang's takeout order failed to deliver the steamed buns to the City God Temple; instead, he received a meat-filled rice dumpling and a bowl of borscht.

Luo Xiyuan sat in the general manager's chair, which she hadn't yet changed into with her own name tag, picked up her chopsticks, poked at the zongzi, smelled it, and put it down.

It's sweet.

She forgot that Shanghainese people's zongzi (sticky rice dumplings) are all sweet.

The borscht was still palatable, sour and hot. She took a few sips while looking at the server architecture document that the technical supervisor, Zhao Peng, had rushed to submit on the table.

The document is over thirty pages long, and the problem is concentrated on page seven—the existing database is a single-point read/write system, and is not designed for this level of concurrency at all.

If the number of concurrent online users doubles again, it will inevitably crash again.

She circled three places on that page, wrote a few words, closed the document, and sent a text message to Xu Yang: "I've read Zhao Peng's plan. The general direction is correct, but it requires a complete overhaul of the existing architecture and rewriting, which will mean at least two days of downtime. Can you accept that?"

The other side replied quickly: "————Have you calculated how much Liuyong will be lost due to the two-day server shutdown?"

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"Have you calculated how many times it will crash if we don't stop the service and hold out for another three months?"

After a two-minute silence, he replied with a single word: "Okay."

That's settled.

She asked Xu Yang to send her the announcement text for review, and revised it seven times. She stared at the last sentence for a long time: "We are building a larger farm for you. This will take some time. Wait for us, it won't be long."

Don't be too official; make users feel that someone is seriously working on it, but don't let them feel that the game might collapse at any moment.

She thought it was okay and sent it out.

At 11 p.m. that night, she took a taxi back to the hotel.

It was a nearby fast-food chain. She didn't ask the company to order an expensive one. Every penny in the account should be spent wisely, not for showing off at this time.

Once inside the room and off my shoes, I realized my feet were a little sore; I'd been wearing them all day without sitting down to rest.

She lay down on the bed, her phone screen lit up with three unread messages.

Luo Wen: "Sister, Moutai went up by 4 yuan today."

Luo Xinde: "Have you arrived yet? Have you eaten? Be careful."

Li Minxia sent the message at 10:30 PM: "Xiyuan, something minor happened at the factory today, but I handled it myself, so don't worry. Remember to eat."

She read through all three messages and replied to Luo Wen, "Received. Keep an eye on it."

Then Luo Xinde said, "We've arrived. We've eaten. Don't worry."

Finally, it was Li Minxia's turn. After thinking for a moment, she replied with four words: "How was it handled?"

Two minutes later, a long message came from the other end: The supplier's soybean meal seemed off, so we sent it for testing. The results showed that the moisture content was too high, so we returned the goods and deducted 5% of the payment from the supplier.

After reading the passage, Luo Xiyuan held her phone to her chest for a while.

Her mother has made great progress.

Two years ago, Li Minxia could barely understand the accounting books, but now she can not only detect excessive moisture in soybean meal, but also knows how to issue fines.

She replied, "Yes, well handled. Next time, don't be lenient when switching suppliers."

I put my phone on the bedside table and turned off the light.

There is a lot of noise in Shanghai at night, such as the sound of footsteps upstairs, car horns outside, and the sound of the TV on in the next room.

She thought about the three-story building in Luojia Village, and the trees in the backyard, then closed her eyes and went to sleep.

These 28 days were the most packed days of her life; when she was so busy, even her sleep was pieced together in fragments.

Among the three new architects recruited by the technology department, one named Su Zhe brought a complete distributed solution that could theoretically support tens of millions of concurrent connections.

After reviewing the proposal, Luo Xiyuan asked Su Zhequan three questions, which he answered correctly. The data was consistent and the logic was clear.

She approved it on the spot.

During the two-day service outage, she personally oversaw the coordination between the technical department and the campus network, starting at 2 a.m. and continuing until the afternoon of the following day.

After the server shutdown announcement was released, someone left a comment on the forum saying, "Who wrote this copy? It's quite cute."

Xu Yang sent her a screenshot, and she replied with two words: "Keep going."

Then there's the issue of cheats/hacks.

The Ministry of Justice sent out more than 30 lawyer's letters and blocked nearly 40,000 accounts. Two cheat software studios were directly sued, which sparked heated discussions on the forum.

Some people criticized it, some cheered it, but everyone saw that Happy Farm is not to be trifled with.

Just as things calmed down over there, the product department brought more good news—the core framework of Happy Ranch had been successfully implemented.

The lead designer is Ye Yu, 25 years old. She is talkative, quick-witted, and will start drawing on the whiteboard halfway through a conversation, and then start talking again halfway through the drawing. She is the kind of person who was born to design products.

One day, Luo Xiyuan stood next to her listening to her present her plan and interjected with a sentence that pushed a long-convoluted logic forward by a significant step.

Ye Yu turned her head, looked at her with a strange expression for a moment, and said, "President Luo, have you rural people really ever farmed?"

"My family raises pigs."

Ye Yu thought for a moment and replied seriously, "No wonder you understand user psychology. People who have raised pigs know best how to feed them."

The entire product department was furious.

Luo Xiyuan smiled too.

Laughing with people outside your family feels different; it's relaxing and genuine.

On the last night, Xu Yang treated her to steamed buns at the City God Temple, and she finally got to eat them.

During the meal, he raised his glass and said something rather solemn: "President Luo, our company has survived to this day because of you."

Luo Xiyuan bit into a small steamed bun, the soup scalding her mouth. She wiped it with a tissue and said, "You're alive because you have things. I'm just helping you see how much those things are worth."

Xu Yang wanted to continue speaking, but she interrupted him.

"Your train leaves tomorrow morning, so get some sleep tonight. The money in the account is enough to last until the end of the year. I've already sent you the next phase of the betting target, so take a good look at it."

The next morning, a taxi was waiting at the hotel entrance. She dragged her suitcase out. Shanghai winters are a bit gloomy, windy, and cold.

She sent a message to Luo Wen from her car: "I'm going home today. When I get home tonight, ask Mom to save some dinner for me."

Three seconds later, Luo Wen replied with a single word: "Okay."

Then she sent another message: "Moutai rose by 6 yuan today, sis, come back quickly, I can't keep up with the stock market."

Luo Xiyuan looked at the message, put her phone in her coat pocket, closed her eyes, and leaned against the car window.

I can't keep up with the calculations anymore.

She almost burst out laughing.

Luo Wen's situation in the class is very delicate.

He wasn't the kind of person to show off. Ever since his sister went to Shanghai, he went to the classroom at seven o'clock every morning, attended classes, went home, then went to the farm to help Grandpa Liu record data, and then compiled the daily revenue from the four lines into a table and sent it to his sister.

He never mentioned his family to his classmates, but the village was so small that news traveled faster than dandelions.

The whole school knew that Luo Wen's family had become rich overnight by raising pigs; they bought an entire building in the county town, and his sister had even gone to Shanghai to do business.

This led to a troublesome situation.

There was a guy in the class named Qian Baosheng, whose father was a contractor in town. He was always arrogant, and when he saw that Luo Wen's family had money, he started picking a fight with her—he provoked Luo Wen in a skillful way.

Last week in math class, the teacher asked everyone to check their work on scratch paper. After Luo Wen finished, Qian Baosheng exclaimed, "Oh, rich people are really rich! They even finish problems faster than others. Did they look at the answers beforehand?"

A few people around him chuckled.

The teacher didn't hear it on the blackboard.

Luo Wen remained seated, without moving or raising his head. He reviewed the problem again, checked it once more to confirm it was correct, flipped the scratch paper over, and moved on to the next problem.

He wasn't unaware of what Qian Baosheng meant, but there was no need to waste time here.

A week before the final exam, their class held a joint study session, and the math teacher, Mr. Wang, called on several students who usually had good grades to go to the blackboard and explain the most challenging problem.

The two students who were called on both got stuck after going up to the blackboard. One wrote two lines and then stopped, while the other revised the blackboard three times, making it more and more messy.

Then Teacher Wang selected Luo Wen.

Luo Wen walked up, took the chalk, and read through the question from beginning to end.

He had done this problem before; there was a similar variation in the exercise book his sister sent back last week, and he did it three times.

He started writing, explaining as he wrote, at a slow pace, clearly explaining the meaning of each step and why it was transformed in this way, and then moving on after the transformation was complete.

People started picking up pens and taking notes.

Teacher Wang leaned against the podium, looking at the blackboard, opened the book, compared it with Luo Wen's line of thought, made marks with his head down, and nodded occasionally.

After finishing his speech, Luo Wen put the chalk back in the tray and turned to walk back to his seat.

As I passed Qian Baosheng's row, I didn't look over there, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Qian Baosheng's textbook blocking the edge of the table, and his draft paper was covered with a bunch of words, all of which were the problem-solving steps he had just explained.

Luo Wen returned to his seat, sat down, and put his pencil away.

Teacher Wang stood up and said to the class, "Classmates, improved family circumstances aren't necessarily a bad thing. But some people change when their circumstances improve, while others don't. I've thought about this before. Today, I want to say that Luo Wen hasn't changed."

The whole class was silent for a few seconds.

Then someone clapped. It started with just one person in the front row, and gradually spread to the back, eventually reaching most of the class.

Luo Wen sat there, unsure of where to look.

He lowered his head and looked at the exercise book on the table.

The cover was worn and frayed from being turned over so many times, and two pages had their corners folded repeatedly.

This is a set of practice questions that my sister bought from the county town when she came back last time. She said it was a set of questions used by high school students in the city, and she wanted him to learn them in advance.

He stared at that book for two days, but thought it was too difficult and didn't want to do it.

His sister slammed the book down in front of him and said, "If you find it difficult now, but you still find it difficult in middle school, that will be truly embarrassing."

After saying that, he left without even staying for a meal.

He stared at the cover for two whole days before finally opening it.

On the day the final exams ended, the weather was sunny and the sun was shining brightly. There were stalls selling roasted sweet potatoes at the school gate, and steam was rising from them.

Uncle Chen parked his old bicycle at the school gate, with a canvas bag tied to the back seat containing the sweet potatoes that Luo Xinde had brought.

"Ah Wen, how did the exam go?"

"good."

Your sister is coming back today.

Luo Wen paused, then quickened his pace, walked to the car, and sat down in the back seat.

The sweet potatoes in the canvas bag were digging into his leg, so he shifted to the side, took out his phone, and texted his sister: "Uncle Chen is here to pick me up. Where are you?"

After about five minutes, I received a reply: "Almost there. Tell Mom to cook two extra bowls of rice; I'm bringing things back."

Luo Wen put his phone back in his pocket, then took it out again and sent a message: "Moutai's price has gone up again today."

The reply came quickly: "I know."

Then came one word: "Fragrant".

Luo Wen kept a straight face and covered the phone screen with his lap so that Uncle Chen couldn't see it.

Uncle Chen was riding his bicycle on a dirt road with several potholes, making the ride very bumpy.

The evening wind flattened the roadside grass and then bounced it up again. People were harvesting the last crop in the fields, and the smoke from distant chimneys rose straight up, even without wind.

Luo Wen sat in the back seat, thinking about that final exam question, and mentally checked it again.

That's absolutely right.