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YellowPages.com migrates to Rails

Posted by Annalisa Afeltra in Ruby on Rails - 4 comments

Yes it’s complete from the intervention of John Straw, Chief Software Architect or YellowPages.com. It was very enlightening and useful. These people can boast with numbers with all respect and they are the second biggest case study on the Ruby on Rails front: 23 million visitors a month. They have just recently migrated to Rails and it has been a success.

From 125.000 lines of code in Java, mainly written by external consultants from 2004 to 2005, to at least 20.000 lines of code in only 3 months of development from a team of 4 developers. The previous version of code of the Yellow Pages was suffering from diverse problems, such as:

1. difficult maintaining
2. difficult to extend
3. not well adapted to SEO activity

The new version responds to all these interrogations and many others. The new architecture is based on 90% Rails and the structure appeared like this:

The choice of Rails was reached from results of diverse evaluations that they did involving also the architecture EJB3/Java e Python/Djongo. At the end the management has decided to bet on Rails, considered as the best solution to the problem. When it was realized using Capistrano for the delivery phase e 25 machines in the production environment.

But the question that everyone that is attending this intervention is asking was: ... and the performance? 23 Million visitors a month is a big challenge for every operating environment, the goals that Yellow Pages had were:

... but not all of them were easy and immediate, but at the moment of the launch all them demonstrated totally acceptable:

In conclusion … a great success:

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