Scaling Synchronous Web Apps: Lessons Learned from Meebo

Sometimes silence in a conversation can mean more than just a pause in breath… When communicating synchronously, an unintended glitch in the communication mechanism can be awkward, confusing, and sometimes dangerous! Meebo is now home to 35 million unique people on a monthly basis and with that many people, Meebo’s servers are handling over 5 billion messages a day. All of those messages have to be delivered instantly, reliably, and without fail.

Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo, will talk about how Meebo was able to get around some of the tricky ins and outs of building a fast, reliable, scalable synchronous web application, and go over tips and tricks that Meebo learned on its way to scalability and the methods they employ to ensure fast service.

Users usually have much longer session times, long persistent connections, and many more quirks that browsers just aren’t particularly equipped to deal with all that elegantly. Optimizing browser payload, long polling, and event-driven web servers are just some of the ways to help scale. Jen will talk about why traditional methods may not always work in the synchronous case, and how sometimes the simplest change can make a huge difference.