Technical Challenges of Developing a Facebook Game

Technical Challenges of Developing 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 a Facebook 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:

Backend Development

Operations

24/7

Cent/DAU(should be low)

Rapid Growth

Ever changing Facebook 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

Q & A

Links

•wooga.com/jobs

•newrelic.com

•scoutapp.com

•pingdom.com

•huesler-informatik.ch

One last thing

euruko2011.org