Scaling Synchronous Web Apps: Lessons Learned from Meebo
Sometimes silence in a conversation can mean more than just a pause in
breath… When communicating synchronously, an unintended glitch in
the communication mechanism can be awkward, confusing, and sometimes
dangerous! Meebo is now home to 35 million unique people on a monthly
basis and with that many people, Meebo’s servers are handling over 5 billion messages a day. All of those messages have to be delivered instantly, reliably, and without fail.
Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo, will talk about how Meebo was able to
get around some of the tricky ins and outs of building a fast, reliable, scalable synchronous web application, and go over tips and tricks that Meebo learned on its way to scalability and the methods they employ to ensure fast service.
Users usually have much longer session times, long persistent connections, and many more quirks that browsers just aren’t particularly equipped to deal with all that elegantly. Optimizing browser payload, long polling, and event-driven web servers are just some of the ways to help scale. Jen will talk about why traditional methods may not always work in the synchronous case, and how sometimes the simplest change can make a huge difference.
comments
This was a great session. Sandy's a great speaker, which made some things that might've been a little dryer at least funny or interesting. There was some overlap in what I was looking for info on, so that's always useful, too. Thanks for the session, it was one of my favorites.
Very good session in my opinion. Sandy was very clear and concise in her session. And slides provided good visual help because of the speed Sandy had while talking.