Company: Mötesplatsen I Norden AB
Application: Market-leading dating web site
Server configuration: 6 caching servers and 16 remote clients
Reason for deployment: Web traffic had created a database bottleneck that degraded site performance and server traffic was not load balanced. Innovation was at a standstill.
Results: Database traffic has been significantly reduced and response times are faster, greatly improving the customer experience and giving Mötesplatsen the opportunity to innovate.
Background
Performance and scalability are crucial when your website is playing matchmaker for over 140,000 people. Mötesplatsen needed to give its web application architecture a makeover when databases became deadlocked and server workloads were uneven.
Challenges
Mötesplatsen was experiencing heavy database traffic that triggered deadlocks, bringing all dating activity to a halt. The timeouts led to dissatisfied customers and frequent complaints.
In an attempt to remediate the problem, its development resources were cycled into rewrites of the database. But, innovating with new features would mean buying more expensive database servers. Consequently, Mötesplatsen had to choose performance over innovation. “We always try to have a fast site. We never released anything that slowed the site down that much,” said CTO Patrik Corneliusson.
Complexity was also an issue as complicated database queries were required to persist object changes across sites.
To increase performance and simplify storage, Mötesplatsen selected ScaleOut StateServer® to offload their database and store selected data in-memory.
Results
Love’s labor is no longer lost. Database traffic has been reduced dramatically since deploying ScaleOut StateServer, and deadlocks are much less likely to occur with fewer locks on the database.
“The possibility to cache deserialized application data is a very good feature for performance.”
–Patrik Corneliusson, Head of development
Most importantly, Mötesplatsen can be more responsive to its customers’ demands. “The distributed cache gave us tools so that we can build all the functions that we, and our customers, want and demand,” Corneliusson explained.
ScaleOut StateServer’s distributed data grid has also improved the overall response time of Mötesplatsen’s websites with the linear scalability that it provides.
Further, objects can now be modified from within the distributed cache, freeing Mötesplatsen from its reliance on database queries. Objects are replicated for mission critical reliability.
Deployment Details
ScaleOut StateServer was deployed in one week. The initial tests were conducted on a single workstation, where traffic was simulated with scripts. The average response time for receiving an object from ScaleOut StateServer was 0.28 milliseconds in the test environment.
ScaleOut StateServer was then deployed to a multi-server test environment to stress test its object replication capabilities by simulating server failures. Mötesplatsen was happy with the results.
Mötesplatsen is currently using ScaleOut StateServer’s remote client configuration in production as a layer between its applications and database. “Almost all of our applications are configured with this,” Corneliusson said.
Mötesplatsen’s administration sites, mobile site, payment servers, and websites all use ScaleOut StateServer’s distributed cache. Modifications made to an object from one site are immediately available to all of the other sites.
The websites have 11,000 concurrent users, which generate about 4,500 reads per second to ScaleOut StateServer’s distributed in-memory cache, according to Corneliusson.
“The customers are happier now since the sites are fast and have all the functions and features that they need.”
–Patrik Corneliusson, Head of development
About Mötesplatsen
Mötesplatsen I Norden AB, opened 2001, is an award-winning dating site with 140,000 active members in Sweden and Norway. It is the leader in those markets. There are currently 20 full time employees working at its headquarters in Varberg.
Mötesplatsen I Norden AB is part of the Norwegian listed Schibsted Group.
For further information visit: www.motesplatsen.se