Online advertisement. How do you handle billion events per day?

Hi,

It was an interesting day today. I'm taking a part in a two days conference named Affilicon. This is the first affiliates networks and affiliates conference in Israel.

Why do I care?
Well, we have several clients in this field.

Why these clients are interested in our services?
Well, it seems that online advertisement systems is a major source for high end system that must handle thousands of events per seconds, or billions of events per day!

Are there so many?
Ya, these systems are counting every banner, text ad or video impression. Think for a second about Google Adwords. Have you taken a look on your conversation rates? Did you think how many text ads do they serve per day? Did you think how do they count all these impressions?

How do they handle these rates?
Well, these players have very large farms (Google for example has around 1 Millions servers in its data centers). They also implement complex solutions to handle these stress in complex ways, doing it all using commodity servers

So how do RockeTier help them?
Well in various ways: 1) boosting their performance, reducing their number of servers by factor of up to 20; 2) implementing shredding, load balancers and grid solutions in order to split the processing between several servers and reducing the stress on each server and 3) use better algorithms to better their system

Best,
Moshe
RockeTier

.NET Web Application Boosting

Hi,

We are involved these days in a large ASP.Net project for a new company in the online advertising field (Great company with a great innovative product, which I'll clearly present when time will come). The product includes both a large back office system, and an impressive real time/black box server system which is designed to support 200 million events per day (and counting).

I wanted to share several concepts we are using in order to boost their system and reach these numbers:
1. Using a grid infrastructure - we are using Gigaspaces XAP. This is a great product, which enables us reaching 20 Million events per day on a single commodity server and achieve linear growth. Since our customer is a startup, it is registered to Gigaspaces startup program, meaning it gets the product free out of charge.
2. Using custom http handlers - this technique enables creating a class library assembly that can be linked directly to, without going through a standard .aspx page. This method reaches 5-10% boost over the standard ASPX method.
3. Using async pages - This method turns the regular syncronized ASPX web pages into async ones. Why is it so important? since even interactive web pages may include calls to relatively time consuming methods like reading/storing files on disk or consuming web services. In these cases the request will wait in the thread pool till the time consuming method will finish its job. The result is clear: preventing another web requests to be handled. Async pages releases the bottleneck by processing these time consuming methods in another thread pool. By doing that, it enables us serving more requests on a single server. Read some more at: Pluralsight, ASP.NET Resources blog and this one.

Have a great weekend,
Moshe
RockeTier