How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/2/8/how-farmville-scales-to-harvest-75-million-players-a-month.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HighScalability+%28High+Scalability%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

by z8000 • 16 years ago

60 23 16 years ago

highscalability.com

z80005• 16 years ago

I wish there was more data offered!

Request-response, XHR, long-polling, "COMET" (blarg, I hate that moniker) when talking to the backend?

axod3• 16 years ago

Don't forget WebSocket ;)

z80005• 16 years ago

True, but I don't think development versions of browsers have 75MM users at this time. Maybe in 2020 when HTML5 is ratified. :)

pavlov• 16 years ago

Isn't FarmVille a Flash game? If so, it presumably uses Flash XML sockets instead of Comet-style browser hacks.

amitt• 16 years ago

We use AMF protocol as XML is slow to parse on the client

richcollins• 16 years ago

He said that they're using LAMP. I'd like to hear more about how they deal with schema updates and how they model their data in general.

teej• 16 years ago

As far as I know they... don't. MySQL is used more as a persistent store for bits, not as a relational database.

ehsanul5• 16 years ago

They use cache components to scale their writes, since they have so many writes. I assume this means that instead of hitting disk for every write, data in the cache is updated instead, and asynchronously saved to disk. Really, this pattern should be generalized, in some sort of memcached extension/fork or something.

aristus2• 16 years ago

MySQL has this in the form of the startup option innodb_txn_commit. It performs all writes to memory and flushes them to disk in 1-second batches. It's a good way to scale up to 000's of writes per second per machine.

ehsanul5• 16 years ago

Nice, but when you're scaling to such a large size, you probably want to go NoSQL, unless you use MySQL as a key-value store (which I've heard of some people do).

Another thing: Many applications, can get away with updating to disk much less often, say every 30 seconds or even longer if appropriate. When a machine fails then, you lose 30 seconds worth of updates stored in that machine's RAM, which may be fine. For some applications, you could probably stand losing even a few minutes of updates on a failure, while gaining huge decreases in loads on disk.

blader• 16 years ago

I just googled for that option and I couldn't find it. What's the option supposed to be?

rbranson• 16 years ago

Redis does this.

ehsanul5• 16 years ago

Which is great. But I think there's a need for something more generalized, just as memcached provides for caching. Then you could use any database at the back.

How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

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