每秒处理大量请求和数据库的Ruby on Rails性能

Question

I'm developing a polling application that will deal with an average of 1000-2000 votes per second coming from different users. In other words, it'll receive 1k to 2k requests per second with each request making a DB insert into the table that stores the voting data.

I'm using RoR 4 with MySQL and planning to push it to Heroku or AWS.

What performance issues related to database and the application itself should I be aware of?

How can I address this amount of inserts per second into the database?

EDIT

I was thinking in not inserting into the DB for each request, but instead writing to a memory stream the insert data. So I would have a scheduled job running every second that would read from this memory stream and generate a bulk insert, avoiding each insert to be made atomically. But i cannot think in a nice way to implement this.

Answer 1

While you can certainly do what you need to do in AWS, that high level of I/O will probably cost you. RDS can support up to 30,000 IOPS; you can also use multiple EBS volumes in different configurations to support high IO if you want to run the database yourself.

Depending on your planned usage patterns, I would probably look at pushing into an in-memory data store, something like memcached or redis, and then processing the requests from there. You could also look at DynamoDB, which might work depending on how your data is structured.

Are you going to have that level of sustained throughput consistently, or will it be in bursts? Do you absolutely have to preserve every single vote, or do you just need summary data? How much will you need to scale - ie will you ever get to 20,000 votes per second? 200,000?

These type of questions will help determine the proper architecture.