The document discusses some of the technical challenges of developing a successful Facebook game, including needing to support high numbers of daily and concurrent users, handling thousands of requests and database queries per second, and ensuring rapid and scalable growth as the game's popularity increases on the Facebook platform. It also provides an overview of the typical architecture for a Facebook game, including using an iframe within Facebook, a Flash client, a backend system, and integrating with Facebook APIs.

1. Technical Challenges of
Developing a Facebook
Game
webilea Basel, 26-01-2011

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

4. Players in Facebook
Game Market

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

6. Anatomy of a
Facebook game

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

8. Facebook Game
Lingo

9. Monthly Active Users
(MAU)

10. Current MAU Leader

11. City Ville
~ 100 Million MAU

12. Daily Active Users
(DAU)

13. Current DAU Leader

14. City Ville
~ 20 Million DAU

15. check
http://appdata.com

16. Challenges

17. Goal:
~ 1’000’000 DAU

18. 2 People for:

19. Backend
Development

20. Operations

21. 24/7

22. Cent/DAU
(should be low)

23. Rapid Growth

24. Ever changing
Facebook APIs

25. 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.)

26. Our Architecture

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

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

29. Automate,
automate,
automate!!!!!!!

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

31. CDN to deliver
assets

32. Rails Application

33. Yes, really!

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

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

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

37. Q&A

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

39. One last thing

40. euruko2011.org