Archive for May, 2008
Let’s play…
May 19th, 2008I have been involved in a nice gaming project in the last couple of weeks.
In the first meeting, giving an overview, the prospect presented their challenge:
“We store game data in memory as we need very fast response time, and we are reaching our limits in terms of supporting our business. We are launching games which support many thousands of users and we are not able to store a game’s data in a single server.
We tried using a database and running our aggregations against it. The response time we got was not acceptable. We want to store game’s data across multiple JVM, but how will which JVM stores which pieces of the data?”
Well, aggregations and data partitioning go very well together if you have the right technology in hand. Nati Shalom wrote a good post on this subject.
The interesting thing is that GigaSpaces supports aggregation since way before the Map/Reduce term was even thought of… When using JavaSpaces’ readMultiple API against a clustered space, the read request is broadcasted to all the cluster members, who execute the request (locally) in parallel, the client side receives back an array of responses which it then needs to aggregate (Reduce). With OpenSpaces, we have Springified this and it is also supported through Spring Remoting with a pluggable reducer at the client side.
A couple of hours after the dev was kicked off, we were able to demo how a single game can span multiple JVMs, aggregate the game’s data in a simple fashion, and display the aggregated result. The system, which was limited to x10,000 concurrent users, can now scale to x100,000 and x1,000,000 linearly using GigaSpaces.
Bingo!
-Guy
GigaSpaces and partners - new offerings at the SIFMA conference, NY, June 10-12
May 19th, 2008If you are one of the 7000+ people planning to attend the 28th SIFMA Technology Management Conference in NY next month, make sure to stop by the GigaSpaces booth. We'll be launching and demonstrating exciting new offerings with Microsoft, Lab 49, Amazon, and more.
You'll find us at the Microsoft mega-booth, in the Grand Ballroom. This year GigaSpaces, along with 4 select partners, [...]
Challenges with scaling MySql on Amazon EC2 and S3
May 19th, 2008During the past few months I've talked to many Amazon EC2 and S3 users. They all face the same interesting challenge: how do I develop a scalable, transactional and data-intensive application in the EC2-S3 cloud environment?
They are experiencing first-hand the painful gap between scalable hardware (what Amazon provides) and a scalable application. Some of them [...]
Twitter as a scalability case study
May 17th, 2008So once again Twitter was down last week for a good chunk of time. A lot has been said already about Twitter’s scalability issues. Many have given Twitter as an anti-pattern of how not to deal with scalability and have…
Thoughts on CommunityOne and EC2
May 16th, 2008Last week I’ve attended CommunityOne at San Francisco. The company I work for (GigaSpaces) had a booth at the startup camp.I’ve recently posted in our company blog describing what I was about to show, and now I would like to share a more “intimate” fee…
