Michael Schaefermeyer

Individualised Content at Web-scale

Bleacher Report is the second largest sport website in the world. At peak times we reach 80 million unique users per month and serve over 100,000 requests per minute to our mobile apps alone. In the past we scaled by adding caching layers, relying heavily on in-memory databases and pre-built content. However as we strive to further individualize the user experience we can no longer rely on caching alone. In elixir and phoenix we found the technology that allowed us to build concurrent api web-servers in an easily approachable language. It complements our existing infrastructure nicely, which is using Ruby on Rails. The performance gains over Ruby allow us to move from a cached-based to a real-time strategy. This talk will give an overview over the caveats we found and how the numbers are showing that we found the right tool for the job.

Target audience:

- Software engineers interested in scaling non-cacheable websites