You are now in FULL VIEW
CLOSE FULL VIEW

YELLOWPAGES.COM: Behind the Curtain
Recorded at:

by John Straw on Mar 12, 2009 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

Summary
This talk explains how YELLOWPAGES.COM, one of the highest-traffic websites in the U.S., was written using Ruby on Rails, how it was scaled to handle the traffic and how the software architecture evolved. Also: the reasons for choosing Ruby on Rails.

Bio

John Straw led the development team which pulled off the YELLOWPAGES.COM Big Rewrite.

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Related Editorial

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread
Community comments

performance by Dorel Vaida

How is it to give a presentation based on a site that is totally down as I am watching the presentation and trying to access it ?

Re: performance by João Vieira da Luz

I'm trying to access to this site... and again is down :)

That's ruby on rails :)

Java is not bad the consultants that wrote the earlier site were bad consultants.
What a bunch of misconceptions about Java.

Re: performance by Frank Falkenberg

Does anybody know the reason for the outage? I guess it is not because of Rails.

very disappointed by Bruce Goldstein

A system with one database connection and they can not use Apache due to performance. I am pretty unimpressed. And they do not use Java because it does not make pretty urls? I was hoping this would be a reason to use ruby but it was more about how sad ATT is at development.

Volume isn't all that high by peter lin

Having worked at a superpages.com a few years back, the volume doesn't impress me. Back in 2002 superpages.com was handling 10million+ pageviews a day and it used tomcat. Today it handles a lot more than that per day using a well thoughout architecture. If the talk was suppose to show how impressive ROR is or can be, I'm not impressed.

a list of things you can do wrong... by Stefan Frank

Maybe he should have looked up in yellowpages.com a person who actually knows how to build something like this. It's one of the "I don't have a clue of java/jee - let's move on to something else I don't have a clue of." I especially like the part about the crap-machines they bought from another company that has gone broke... and the "architecture"-pictures are great, all lines and smoke...

Re: Volume isn't all that high by Samyem Tuladhar

And also I am surprised that they didn't write the search component in-house for a website centered around search!

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread

7 comments
General Feedback
Bugs
Advertising
Editorial
 InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2013 C4Media Inc. InfoQ.com hosted at Contegix, the best ISP we've ever worked with.
Privacy policy