Confessions of a PackRat

When the Facebook game PackRat was released in early 2008, it quickly became one of the largest Rails applications in the world, serving over 12 million page views a day. This session will examine the lessons learnt while building and growing the game. Specifically:

• Using the cloud: the pros and cons of running a popular app on EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB.
• MySQL pitfalls: how scaling the database tier nearly killed us, and how we survived.
• Caching strategies: memcached vs. memoization, and the best of both worlds.
• Interacting with Facebook: third-party libraries vs. rolling your own.
• Dealing with cheaters: detecting and thwarting duplicate accounts, bots, and GreaseMonkey hacks.
• Why we re-wrote the application from scratch, and switched from Rails to Merb in the process.