Keeping Kids Connected on MovieStarPlanet
Launched in 2009, MovieStarPlanet is one of the world’s most popular social networking sites for tweens, with more than 100 million registered users in 15 countries and 11 different languages. Interactivity and creativity are key to MovieStarPlanet’s success, and we launch new and improved game features weekly to ensure game progression and user engagement.
Keeping a growing user base of tweens engaged in this expanding and competitive market creates a major challenge for our IT staff, whose main concern is to provide our movie stars with the best possible gaming experience. During peak load times, excessive demand for reads and writes used to lead to excessive queuing, web server timeouts, and sometimes database crashes when the I/O load exceeded our system’s ability to handle performance needs.
This situation was unacceptable, so we implemented a solution using Fusion-io products to better exploit the processing power of our current system and to address the latency issues resulting from our spinning-disk storage.
As the Fusion-io case study shows, initial installation of ioDrives in the US provided immediate performance improvements. The database has no performance issues and moderators have even received reports from loyal users that the site is much more responsive. We found that all the previous bottlenecks were gone. Using Fusion-io allows MovieStarPlanet IT Operations to move from reactive to proactive. We no longer have to worry about the timing of our marketing campaigns and whether our systems can keep up with the surges in traffic as a result of advertising. By preempting the performance bottlenecks, MovieStarPlanet has the infrastructure in place to deal with traffic peaks, without compromising the user experience.
This installation proved so successful, we have since implemented ioDrives on all of our databases worldwide.
