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The BBC's iPlayer site averages 8 million page views a day for 1.3 million users. Technical Architect Simon Frost describes how they scaled their site in Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand:
- Use frameworks. Frameworks support component based development which makes it convenient for team development, but can introduce delays that have to be minimized. Zend/PHP is used because it supports components and is easy to recruit for. MySQL is used for program metadata. CouchDB is used for key-value access for fast read/write of user-focused data.
- Prove architecture before building it. Eliminate guesswork by coming up with alternate architectures and create prototypes to determine which option works best. Balance performance with factors like ease of development.
- Cache a lot. Data is cached in memcached for a few seconds to minutes. Short cache invalidation periods keep the data up to date for the users, but even these short periods make a huge difference in performance. Caching doesn't have to be for a long time to see a benefit. Varnish is used to cache HTML pages. Much of the invalidation is time or action-based (e.g. someone adds a new favourite).
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