I am working on a Ruby on Rails application where musicians/bands can come and share/advertise their tracks/albums etc. Something similar to purevolume.com or reverbnation.com.
There is going to be lot of audio and video streaming on the website as well as digital downloads. In addition to these there are things like photo galleries, blogs, forums, etc... essentially pretty much everything to make it a user driven website and have stuff to cater to all age groups.
I am expecting the site to have between 5,000 - 10,000 page views per day within 6 months of launch. It could grow much larger after that and at present I am not in a position to estimate that user load.
With this information about the application, I have two main questions... both about scalability:
1. What are the steps from the application design/architecture point of view that should be followed for scaling the Rails application with this kind of user load?
2. How to address scalability for application having streaming content?
3. How should I plan for scalability at the Hardware Level (for both Rails app and streaming)?
Let me know if any more information about the application is required in order to suggest a good solution to this.
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Hi Mikel,
Thanks a lot for your advice.
I have one more question... i.e.
The music/videos will be copyrighted stuff... and we want the users to be able to only listen/watch those on the website and not download them (unless ofcourse, if it is available for free download from the owner). So, if these files are not server through Rails app, then how should I control/restrict the download access?
If you let them download the file to listen to it, then they will be able to download the file to save it.
Your best bet here would be to get someone on your team to make a Flash applet that runs in the client browser and downloads the preview of the song and plays it for them.
This is not fool proof, but a lot better than nothing.
Mikel
There is no way to prevent people stealing your songs.
Even if you put all the copy protection in the world on your audio, at the end of the day, you have to let the client computer PLAY the song. If they can play the song, they can re-record the song.
Even if your software stops this, the client computer can put a program in the system that listens to the OUTPUT before it goes to the computer and record this. Sunflower (I think is what it is called) is a Mac Program that will re-record anything that your speakers can play.
I would worry less about this and focus more on your business model to provide such a good service, that people won't want to rip you off. Focus on the people that are willing and able paying customers and make their experience as simple and easy as possible, put some minor security in to stop 99% of the hackers, but don't go over board.
After all, anyone who is bent on stealing your media, will, and can. Unless you shut down your site. Why treat your paying customers like they are criminals by subjecting them to all the same security and measures? Treat them like what they are, the lifeblood of your organization and they will reward you.
Mikel
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by: raasdnilPosted on 2009-01-17 at 00:20:13ID: 23399985
But, here are my ideas...
I run several RoR websites with video and audio streaming. We do all our stuff in house, but in hindsight, I would have used one of the companies, such as EnginYard (no, I don't get any commission... shame)...
So each of your questions:
1. What are the steps from the application design/architecture point of view that should be followed for scaling the Rails application with this kind of user load?
Rails scales, as long as you know what you are doing. Some of the things you want to look at is avoid having rails serve any of the file content. You want to take advantage of Apache's X-Sendfile directive or similar in the other web servers. Serving large static files from Ruby on Rails will just tie up your web server and cause all sorts of problems, aside from being slow, also, when RoR sends a file, it sends it in 4k chunks... but loads the whole file into RAM first... OK for a small file... but scary for a 400mb video file...
You want to keep your large files out of the database, just keep pointers to file system resources. File systems are a custom built and highly efficient database for... files! Use them.
Aside from that major bugbear, the rest of your site is probably going to be quite easy in Rails. I wouldn't stress too much about caching and performance until you get closer to launch. Good use of Active Support's cache action, page and fragment methods should get you by for most of it.
2. How to address scalability for application having streaming content?
This is where you want to hook up with someone like EnginYard. Seriously, they do this for a living and seem like they know what they are doing. You can get a developer account and start staging and setting up the environment.
3. How should I plan for scalability at the Hardware Level (for both Rails app and streaming)?
Again, see #2. I would off load this problem elsewhere.
Regards
Mikel