Confessions of a PackRat
Scott Raymond (Alamofire, Inc.)
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When the Facebook game PackRat was released in early 2008, it quickly took off, and now serves over 12 million page views a day. This session will highlite some of the lessons learned while building and scaling the game—including hard numbers, and code. Specifically:
- Using the cloud: the pros and cons of running a popular app on EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB.
- MySQL pitfalls: how scaling the database tier nearly killed us, and how we survived.
- Caching strategies: memcached vs. memoization, and the best of both worlds.
- Interacting with Facebook: third-party libraries vs. rolling your own.
- Dealing with cheaters: detecting and thwarting duplicate accounts, bots, and GreaseMonkey hacks.
- Why we re-wrote the application from scratch, against conventional wisdom.
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Scott Raymond
Alamofire, Inc.
Scott Raymond is the author of Ajax on Rails, published by O’Reilly. He is a long-time user of, advocate for, contributor to, and consultant on, Rails.
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Comments
Well done! I really appreciated the specific details, like how many AWS servers you run and of what type. Really helpful when trying to decide how a Facebook app backed by rails will scale. Good luck!