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This is a guest post by Ben Lowry, CEO of Playtomic. Playtomic is a game analytics service implemented in about 8000 mobile, web and downloadable games played by approximately 20 million people daily.
Here's a good summary quote by Ben Lowry on Hacker News:
Just over 20,000,000 people hit my API yesterday 700,749,252 times, playing the ~8,000 games my analytics platform is integrated in for a bit under 600 years in total play time. That's just yesterday. There are lots of different bottlenecks waiting for people operating at scale. Heroku and NodeJS, for my use case, eventually alleviated a whole bunch of them very cheaply.
Playtomic began with an almost exclusively Microsoft.NET and Windows architecture which held up for 3 years before being replaced with a complete rewrite using NodeJS. During its lifetime the entire platform grew from shared space on a single server to a full dedicated, then spread to second dedicated, then the API server was offloaded to a VPS provider and 4 – 6 fairly large VPSs. Eventually the API server settled on 8 dedicated servers at Hivelocity, each a quad core with hyperthreading + 8gb of ram + dual 500gb disks running 3 or 4 instances of the API stack.
These servers routinely serviced 30,000 to 60,000 concurrent game players and received up to 1500 requests per second, with load balancing done via DNS round robin.
In July the entire fleet of servers was replaced with a NodeJS rewrite hosted at Heroku for a significant saving.
Scaling Playtomic with NodeJS
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