Technical Challenges of Developing a Facebook Game

Technical Challenges ofDeveloping a Facebook Game webilea Basel, 26-01-2011

Who?• Patrick Hüsler / @phuesler• huesler-informatik.ch• Freelance developer• backend developer at ....

Players in Facebook Game Market

Game Developers• Zynga (54 games)• EA (35 games)• Pop Cap (2 games)• Crowd Star (20 games)• Digital Chocolate (13 games)• Playdom (39 games)

Anatomy of aFacebook game

Sandbox• iframe inside Facebook• ﬂash client (javascript based games are still a minority)• backend• Facebook API (FBML, graph, connect, payment ...)

Facebook Game Lingo

Monthly Active Users (MAU)

Current MAU Leader

City Ville~ 100 Million MAU

Daily Active Users (DAU)

Current DAU Leader

City Ville~ 20 Million DAU

checkhttp://appdata.com

Challenges

Goal:~ 1’000’000 DAU

2 People for:

BackendDevelopment

Operations

Cent/DAU(should be low)

Rapid Growth

Ever changingFacebook APIs

Roughly estimated requirements• ~ 20’000 concurrent users• ~ 4’000 rps• ~ 60’000 DB queries/s• DB write heavy ~ 50/50• Deliver plenty of assets (ﬂash ﬁles, images etc.)

Our Architecture

Status Quo (Peak)• ~ 200’000 DAU• ~ 3’000 concurrent users• ~ 660 rps peak traﬃc• ~ 7000 DB queries/s• 15 ms average response time

Dedicated hardware• small number of machines• fast CPU’s• fast disks• fast network

Automate, automate,automate!!!!!!!

Monitoring• Availability monitoring with pingdom (pingdom.com)• Scout for hardware metrics and usage data (scoutapp.com)• New Relic for applications (newrelic.com)

CDN to deliver assets

Rails Application

Yes, really!

Database: Redis• very fast• powerful data structures• good ﬁt to store diﬀerent types of data• supports virtual memory

Data format• One Redis hash table per user• Keys store JSON• Custom built data mapper called Remodel

Durability: Flat files• Asynchronously written to disk• Replicated on ﬁle system

Links•wooga.com/jobs•newrelic.com•scoutapp.com•pingdom.com•huesler-informatik.ch

One last thing

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Technical Challenges of Developing a Facebook Game

by Patrick Huesler on Jan 27, 2011

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