Monday 28 March 2011

Toygaroo on Rails

Seeing as there has been a lot of press recently about my company Toygaroo I thought I might throw out some tech info for those of you who care.
For those who don't know, Toygaroo is America's biggest toy rental company (think netflix for kid's toys). Recently - March 25th, 2011 - we appeared on the season premiere of Shark Tank - a national television show on ABC. About 4.6 million people watched the show.

The Platform
Toygaroo is a Ruby on Rails 3 application. It is based heavily on the code we wrote for FilmAmora.com, Spain's leading DVD rental company. We are running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. We're using Passenger 3 and Nginx (doesn't everyone?!). We're using Dalli in front of MemCached (though we've had some issues with this that I really should blog about!).

The Host
Right now we are running on Amazon EC2 service - though with Mark Cuban coming on board that might change. I am a big fan of EC2, though I think the machines are a little underpowered for what you pay.

The numbers!
In the 2 hours after the show aired we received around 70,000 page views. The basic architecture is a load balancer sitting in front of a whack of app servers. We are not using a scaling solution right now - hey, we're a start up! - so we wind up more servers if we feel we need them. It is a pretty simple process - I have a script for us to follow to get an Ubuntu server up and running in no time.

Caching
I looked into other solutions, like Varnish, but decided that Rails could handle the job with a combination of page, action and fragment caching. And I haven't been wrong so far. Even under heavy load we are getting great response time. The key - as I found out with FilmAmora - is what level to cache on. We cache 'blocks'. i.e. if you look at an index page with lots of toys we cache each toy block. That block can appear on many different pages, so it is a nice solution I find.

As time goes on I'd like to post more about how Toygaroo is coded and running as I think it will provide a nice real world example for what you can do with Rails 3. If you have any questions drop me a line (comment on here).