

Buildy: 1k HN users placed 250k objects in our HTML5 sandbox - RoboTeddy
http://blog.playbuildy.com/2012/11/14/hn-postmortem/

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mrjoes
As far as I understood from previous post, you're using sockjs-tornado and
firebase for realtime portion.

Two questions:

1\. As sockjs-tornado maintainer I'm very interested in project performance:
what is average server load, how memory consumption looks like, etc;

2\. Why do you use both Tornado and Firebase and not just one of them?

~~~
RoboTeddy
Thank you for maintaining sockjs-tornado! Performance has been shockingly
good.

Setup: sockjs-tornado behind haproxy (on the same ec2 m1.large machine)

Over the 6-hour period the post was at the top of HN, there were about 480
concurrent users. At that time, the python process was using a grand 33
megabytes of memory and the overall system load was at 6%. Go sockjs-tornado
:)

In the past couple days we've pushed 12+ gigabytes of real-time data through
the server without restarting it. Memory usage has grown to a measly 60mb.

2\. We've been using sockjs-tornado to push around ephemeral world update
events, and Firebase for more persistent state-sync things like chat and
presence. That's a pretty vague answer, I'll write it up better in a blog
post!

Please feel free to reach out if you have any more questions -- my address is
in my profile

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jfaucett
great follow up. I was on the site and remember being pleasantly surprised by
the good performance, so As for the ideas for technical posts mentioned at the
end, I'd be most interested in the realtime event publishing with firebase and
tornado and rendering and optimization engine stuff :)

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alexschleber
Very interested in the MongoDB _and_ MySql issue, and trade-offs you've
perceived with each.

