A brief overview of my adventures in scaling an overnight viral suc

1. Wednesday, March 23, 2011

2. Simple Concept
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

3. Simple Concept
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

4. Simple Concept
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

5. Overview
• 1. do an image search for term
• 2. Download first result
• 3. Overlay text on image
• 4. Display image to user
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

6. Simple Execution
• ...built in two hours
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

7. Not so Simple Scaling
• Downloading, resizing, and compositing
2300 images per minute is hard.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

8. Intermission 1
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

9. Initial Architecture
• Used Google Image Search API
• Processed Images with ImageMagick
• Cached images on disk in webroot
• Hosted on a single VPS with several
production systems...
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

10. Initial Timeline
• Saturday, 11:50pm: Posted to Reddit
• Saturday, 11:53pm: Realized this was a bad
idea.
• Saturday, 11:54pm: Started tweaking it run
on Heroku
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

11. About
• Mind-blowingly simple platform for running
Ruby applications
• Scales LIKE A BOSS
• Doesn’t have a writable filesystem
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

12. Changes Required!
• Rewrote to stream images and cache in a
reverse caching proxy
• Switched the DNS over to Heroku
• ...and that worked, for a while
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

13. Intermission 2
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

14. New Development
• Sunday, 2:20am: Reddit frontpage
• Sunday, 2:21am: FYN hits 1500 requests per
minute
• Sunday, 2:25am: Google Image Search bans
our IP range.
• Shit.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

15. Solution:
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

16. Yahoo!’s BOSS API
• Is awesome.
• Does not ban you after four minutes.
• Has much, much less relevant images.
• ...often with hilarious results.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

17. Intermission 3
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

18. Monday Morning
• 2300 requests per minute
• Enlisted Stefan and Tim to help
• Fairly high estimated hosting bill.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

19. Wednesday, March 23, 2011

20. Monday Afternoon
• Decided $800/mo with no revenue is not
okay
• Added a link to “GET THIS ON A
FUCKING SHIRT!”, and AdSense.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

21. Intermission 4
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

22. Ten Seconds Later
• Decided selling shirts with copyrighted
material is probably pushing it
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

23. Three Hours Later
• Got 43 emails from CafePress telling us
that about 400 shirts violated copyright and
had been removed
• Only three people had bought shirts
• ...so we removed the button.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

24. AdSense, though...
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

25. And now no one cares.
• Peak: 2,720,000 pageviews
• Yesterday: 149,000 pageviews
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

26. Donation!
• (AdSense revenue) - (Heroku bill) goes to
SkullSpace
• Probably about $500
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

27. Intermission 6
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

28. It’s Open Source!
• github.com/burke/fuckyeahnouns
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

29. The code is horrible
though.
• I wrote most of it after midnight on a
Saturday.
• Don’t judge me.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

30. Wednesday, March 23, 2011