Ancestry.com, like any other site with millions of subscribers, experiences predictable load patterns throughout the day. To maximize site performance and customer satisfaction, we make every effort to schedule maintenance during off-peak intervals.
Content processing, especially our repository of hundreds of millions of images, on the other hand, is a constant ongoing effort, and in some cases must be done on live content being served up to our customers. One example of this occurs when we roll an improved set of images for a given collection, such as the 1921 Census of Canada, to the live site. Many of these images may have different dimensions than the originally published images. To be sure we get it right, we double check every image in the collection.
Until now, this work was done with a desktop tool that was effective but could take days to complete its work on very large collections. In order to speed this up, the Enterprise Media Team’s distributed computing initiative created a new service that uses a light weight, open source distributed computing framework called DuoVia.MpiVisor, a project led by this author outside of his regular Ancestry.com responsibilities, to distribute the work on five servers with a total of 64 logical processors.
Distributing the work on 64 logical processors was enormously successful, verifying up to 50,000 images’ dimensions every minute. The challenge was that if we were to allow content management access to this very powerful tool at any time during the day, there was a distinct possibility that it would affect the performance of our live site, something we wanted very much to avoid.
To throttle the new image dimension populating (IDP) service, we created three time zones to define high, medium and low traffic periods during the day. During high traffic periods, we only allowed one third of the processing agents to be given work. And during medium traffic periods, only one half of the available processing agents are used. Of course, during off-peak periods, all available agents are utilized.
In the weeks since the IDP service launched, it has processed over 130 million images in just over 6,700 run-time minutes. That is a throttled average of about 19,000 images processed per minute of processing time, far below its current max potential of 50,000 per minute.
By throttling the work, the IDP service remains responsive during peak traffic times without impacting the customer experience, allowing content teams to continue working to deliver the best images as soon as humanly possible to our customers.