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Vod:Pod

Vod:Pod. Hyperaggregation and social recommendation for video. Scott Persinger, Head of Engineering. Who We Are. Mark Hall – former VP International, Real Networks Scott Persinger – former VPE Gofish.com Spencer Miles – founder of JotDot.com and Showaholic.com Located in downtown SF

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Vod:Pod

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  1. Vod:Pod Hyperaggregation and social recommendation for video Scott Persinger, Head of Engineering

  2. Who We Are • Mark Hall – former VP International, Real Networks • Scott Persinger – former VPE Gofish.com • Spencer Miles – founder of JotDot.com and Showaholic.com • Located in downtown SF • Started June 1, 2006 • Site launched Dec 2006

  3. What is vod:pod? • Video aggregation and recommendation site • Many inputs (direct upload, embed codes) • Many outputs (site, widgets, rss) • Social network model • Content is organized in “pods” • Pods are based on a theme or just a social group • Taste-maker model • Show people the coolest videos I’ve found • See what are my friends watching • It’s a delicious web 2.0 stew • UGC, folksonomy, ajax, vitality and attention data

  4. Rails Triumphs • Conception to deployment – 6 months with 2 engineers • More features than my last application – that site built in 6 months with 10 engineers using Java • Simplicity scales, both conceptually and for performance

  5. Rails – Favorite Bits • Migrations! • ActiveRecord works as expected 95% of the time – compare to Hibernate (40%?) • Ajax support with Prototype + Scriptaculous • Plugins and community • Implemented ferret search in 4 hours

  6. Rails Sweetness • RJS + Dynamic Script Tags • Cross-domain Ajax to search.vodpod.com • render(:update) {|page| page.replace_html “id”, :partial => “webresults”} • Hpricot + Mechanize • Super easy DOM parsing and web automation • IO.popen_timeout • Limited execution “popen”, kills process after X seconds

  7. Rails Annoyances • Where do I put “business logic”? • Wait, you modified the Fixnum class? • Would like better support for page components • IDE lacking, no real debugger • Poor support for background tasks • Some poor library support • http-access2 sucks

  8. Challenge: AR limitations • We don’t delete db records, we mark with “is_deleted” • Counter cache used all over, but only works with real record deletion • Gets worse when you create relations with more conditions • User.videos_count depends on both videos.is_published and videos.is_deleted • Solution: remix_belongs_to • ‘belongs_to’ façade adds logic to keep counter_cache correct when relation has conditions • Uses brute-force recalc

  9. Challenge: Scaling • Shared-nothing, right? • Doh! What about all the files on the filesystem? • Uploaded photos • Uploaded videos • Ferret search indexes

  10. Scaling: File assets in the cluster • Video files • served from the specific host • Images • replicated on demand between servers • Ferret index • Unique “search server” to ensure consistency • Yuck, too much complexity

  11. Better Approach? • Shared network storage • NFS? Samba? Eeewww… • Performance and reliablity suspect • NAS – very expensive • Amazon S3 • Likely the best solution, give them the headache • But how to integrate it easily? • Bandwidth is expensive

  12. The Pitch • Come over to vodpod.com! • Collect your favorite videos and publish to your blog. • We’re hiring! scott@remixation.com

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