In March 2010, the UK had an election with a televised leadership debate. We built an application that scaled to 2.7 million hits in 90 minutes on top of AppEngine which we built in about 3 days. See the mistakes we made and what went well.
4. Poll Charts
• "Let people viewing the page vote at
anytime whether they like or dislike what
the party leader is saying. Oh, and lets
show it with a real time graph"
• Bad words here
• anytime
• real-time
23. Memcached?
• Change architecture
• atomic increment/decrement
• get from memcache
• cronjob 1/min
• memcache => datastore
• votes now take 20 ms each
41. Some notes
• Total of around 750,000 requests
• Average of around 138 req/s
• Peaked at around 230 req/s
42.
43.
44. £££ (or $$$)
• Appengine Cost: $Negligable
• plus cdn bandwidth
• plus dev costs
• etc...
45. Any Questions?
Michael Brunton-Spall
@bruntonspall
michael.brunton-spall@guardian.co.uk
Editor's Notes
\n
Scalability on journalistic deadlines.\nOn Thursday 15th April 2010, there was an historic occasion, the UK’s first televised party leader debate for an election.\nAs a news organisation we wanted to not only report the news and information about the debate, but also get feedback from our readers as to what they thought of the debate.\n
Our coverage on the website looked something like this. This was the picture that we put on the main page to encourage people to view our live blog.\n