Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 133 posts

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#51

Post by lmm »

CWIZO wrote: post #35
clu3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, I am not saying that youporn guys are not decent but IMHO, people shouldn't get too excited about this. Youporn is somewhat quite a simple site I'd imagine. It's just categorized videos with a bunch of stats (views, related video...), and users. There's almost no social interaction between users (i've just registered an account just to confirm that). That's a very clear (and good) reason why 100% redis sui…

You would imagine wrong. I'm running a video sharing page (think FB&youtube mashed together with a dash of blogger) with about 800k unique/month users and it's no picnic.

Sure, but the sharing is what makes it hard - as soon as your pages are per-user it gets interesting. For youporn, each video page is essentially static (maybe there are comments? Even if there are, I doubt they display a different set of comments to each /viewer/). So video pages are easy to cache, the database layout is simple, and sure there's some effort involved in scaling up but it's nowhere near as hard as e.g. tumblr's architecture that was featured recently (where every viewer sees a page with all the posts from everyone they're following, and so everyone's page is different)

/briefly worked at last.fm

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#53

Post by nooneelse »

arethuza wrote: post #21
jwr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised if you went to meetings with porn business companies in Japan. Stylish offices, elegant suits, great manners, no hint of actual porn anywhere. In fact, you could easily confuse the office with an investment bank.

I once had a surreal meeting with a hotel chain where they mentioned they had detailed management reports on stuff like the average time films are watched for and that they had a graph showing how long porn movies are watched for. This was all being discussed in the context of a fairly formal business meeting.

Ok, I'm feeling rather naïve and waking up slowly this morning. Why do they care to know that? I mean, what about their business does that help them improve? Because, I think we can take it somewhat for granted that such information probably isn't something which the individuals involved, their customers in this situation, enjoy knowing is being collected about them. "Hey, you know that activity you probably consider rather private, we like to record everything about it we easily can, because umm... customer service."

If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#54

Post by StavrosK »

sanswork wrote: post #33
StavrosK wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300k requests/sec? Surely that can't be on a single Redis server, is it? Is Redis cluster out yet, or did they implement their own?

It would be mostly reads so could be done with lots of slaves and sharding without redis cluster.

Very true, but now I wonder how many reads/sec each of those servers pushed.

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#55

Post by itmag »

badboy wrote: post #3
antirez wrote: post #2

That's porn for database geeks: 100 million pageviews per day, 300k requests per second against Redis. The way they use MySQL is also interesting IMHO: they populate a relational database in order to be able to build new indexes in the Redis side, using the relational DB for the stuff it is best at, generating new "views" of the data easily. (Relational DBs are also good to do a zillion more things of course.)

You know your software is successful when it's used by porn sites :D

Porn and war drive all innovation. Or so they say.

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#56

Post by jgw »

GrumpySimon wrote: post #42
gaius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The online porn industry were the first people to really deal with scalability (of managing and serving web content, anyway), the first people to deal with online payments, the first people to come under really heavy, sustained hacking attempts, etc. Don't underestimate how much of what you take for granted technologically in 2012, they pioneered in the mid-90s.

It's not just now either, the porn industry was hugely influential in causing the adoption and spread of video (you know, on casette), movies and photography.

Indeed - I've heard it argued that the real reason that VHS won out over the technically superior Betamax format, was that Sony refused to license the Betamax technology to adult video vendors. Never dug into it, but it seems plausible.

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#59

Post by Alex3917 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #12

For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel. Then I realize that in order to run a site with the kind of traffic that some of them have, you really need to have some decent engineers on staff.

"For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel."

Pretty much the exact opposite actually. Porn industry guys tend to be 30 - 40 on average and super cool and laid back, though in an LA sort of way. I'm sure there's a lot of crap going on beneath the surface, but at least from the outside it seems like a much nicer work culture than silicon valley.

Re: Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site

#60

Post by simcop2387 »

nooneelse wrote: post #53
arethuza wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a surreal meeting with a hotel chain where they mentioned they had detailed management reports on stuff like the average time films are watched for and that they had a graph showing how long porn movies are watched for. This was all being discussed in the context of a fairly formal business meeting.

Ok, I'm feeling rather naïve and waking up slowly this morning. Why do they care to know that? I mean, what about their business does that help them improve? Because, I think we can take it somewhat for granted that such information probably isn't something which the individuals involved, their customers in this situation, enjoy knowing is being collected about them. "Hey, you know that activity you probably consider…

It probably lets them know how long the movies they produce should be. If it's too long before any action is in there then people move on. If it's not long enough then the customer doesn't get what they want. Optimizing this means that they can take a single 8 hour shoot, that'll produce maybe an hour and a half of good footage (just pulling numbers out of my ass) and make more than one video of the right length to get the most profit out of it.
Post reply on HN