Case Study: Digging into the Technology Behind the Development of Digg

What is digg?

The idea - Oct. 04
Slashdot - User created content
Del.icio.us - Bookmark / Share / Save
Friendster - Social hookups, large groups, no task

$2,000 to launch
Developed a project spec - elance
Open source technologies - LAMP
Basic utilitarian design
$99 a mo. hosting

Feature Decisions
Stay away from me too features
Simple and rewarding - one click (digg, bury, #1)
Used “ajax” where it made sense
Tools to connect to other sites (blog this, javascript widget)
Experiment - spy, “cloud view”, visualizations (stack, swarm)

The “digg effect”

Case Study: From Startup to Enterprise

One Server (Dec 2004-Mar 2005).
Monitoring is “someone is working on the site most of the time.”
Standard LAMP architecture.
Growth -> optimizing queries -> denormalizing.

Growth
Paris Hilton
Silverorange/Digg 2.0
Word of mouth, minimal advertising
Steady growth with occasional insanity

Seed Funding.
Small Number of Servers (May 2004-Sep 2004) - web server, mysql master, mysql slave.
Ad-hoc monitoring.
1 Dedicated operations person.
Silverorange (Digg gets a professional design).
Growth continues to outstrip hardware, though now more constrained by developer resources.

Series A.
$100k on Servers. Spares!
Everyone in the same place
Operations Department (currently 4 people).
Hire senior developers.

Description of Digg Architecture
LAMP + memcached.
Rough estimate of lines of code (historical trend). I.e. Digg 1.0 = 5k lines of code. Digg 2.0 = 50k. Digg 3.0 = 200k (will fill in actual numbers).
Diagram (something like timeless’s “shards” diagram).

Monitoring (Nagios/Cacti). A couple of screenshots - Cacti Graphs.

Development Process. Subversion, Bugzilla, Wiki. Trac.1 Developer --> 3 --> 7. Talk a little about managing that.

Office. Pictures? Moved in May 2006, already outgrowing.

Stats
1M+ Registered users
10M+ Pages per day
1.2M+ Daily unique visitors
100+ Linux boxes (break this down)

New Features/Announcements

Future Plans
Party!!!

Case Study: Digging into the Technology Behind the Development of Digg

by Danny Roa on Apr 24, 2007

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