Saturday, October 13, 2007

Can a Flex application support 500,000 users?

Well, at betfair.com we're going to find out pretty soon as we're pretty close to launching the next generation exchange games trading platform to over 1 million registered customers. If you're attending MAX Barcelona check out Manny Correia's presentation on Tuesday 16th October at 16:00 where you'll get a chance to see a demo of this application.

If you're based in the US make sure you don't miss this session as this may be your only chance. The recent (somewhat misleadingly named) US Port Security Act prevents non-US based gambling companies, including betfair.com, from trading in the US. This act is so at odds with the existing free trade agreements that even the World Trade Organization has ruled against the US. In other cases similar WTO rulings have resulted in severe economic sanctions against the offending country.

11 comments:

TJ Downes said...

I'd venture to say that since Flex is client -side you wont see any issues with the Flex application itself. It's the backend technologies you need to be worried about :D

Anonymous said...

Damn it, i'd love to see this application, but I can't make it to barcelona. When is it going live, or are you gonna give a alpha preview?

Ryan Stewart said...

Hey Graeme, I'd love to blog about the app if you can give me some info and some screenshots. I won't be at MAX so I can't check it out first hand, but it sounds cool.

=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com

Graeme Harker said...

I notice that the news today is that the US may face a fine of up to USD 100 billion for this Act so there may be a chance to see the application in the USA after all.

Anonymous said...

Our organization's Flex RIA currently has over 1 million paid subscribers in 7 different countries - which is a challenge.

For the most part it doesn't matter how many users there are from a client-side perspective as is related to Flex. The most typical issue of concern is the backend as one might imagine. The end-users machine specs (which vary considerably) are also a major factor. And if localization is required this is always the most time consuming.

Best of luck.
- Eric

All in all it is a great challenge!

Ravi said...

Hi I have a question,

I am using some charting controls in my Flex application, to plot the graphs I am using XML as Data Provider. If I use ArrayCollection or someother type, will it improve the speed of my Application?

Graeme Harker said...

I think the perception of the "speed" of you charts will depend more on how long it takes to get the data from the service layer rather than the data type of your dataProvider in the client. If your service layer's written in an interpreted language (such as PHP) then your charts are going to seem much slower than if the service layer's implemented in a compiled language (such as Java or C#).

Ravi said...

Thank You for the reply,

I am using C# in my service layer and passing XML from there. Will it help the speed at the client if I pass or use ArrayCollection

(I have also seen AMF but I don't want to use any third party tools Flouirne, AMF.Net etc)

So my Question is that can ArrayCollection instead of XML increase the speed of my charts to load?

Graeme Harker said...

ActionScript's XML object is "dynamic" whereas ArrayCollection is "sealed" so an ArrayCollection is always going to be "faster" than an XML object.

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

I've seen Java backend supporting hundreds of thousands of users with a flex client. The client is thin though, and it doesn't really matter. If you are using LCDS/BlazeDS you really lighten the processing load. The above is with ~100 servers clustered/load-balanced across two data centers.