For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel. Then I realize that in order to run a site with the kind of traffic that some of them have, you really need to have some decent engineers on staff.
This was all being discussed in the context of a fairly formal business meeting.
Some very interesting insights from the hotels side of things.
If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.
In any case, they probably have no need for individual statistics: the aggregated watching habits of guests is enough to provide useful information.
Pretty much the exact opposite actually. Porn industry guys tend to be 30 - 40 on average and super cool and laid back, though in an LA sort of way. I'm sure there's a lot of crap going on beneath the surface, but at least from the outside it seems like a much nicer work culture than silicon valley.
the guy from pinklab http://www.pinklab.com/reddit.html talked around there, but can't find the link. there were also some others, even a guy who ran a 2g1c kind of site.
And i am happy that my months of lobbying for Redis at the office paid :D
Youporn is somewhat quite a simple site I'd imagine. It's just categorized videos with a bunch of stats (views, related video...), and users. There's almost no social interaction between users (i've just registered an account just to confirm that).
That's a very clear (and good) reason why 100% redis suits for this website, apart from the goodness of redis like sorted sets are perfect for the "top rated" or "being watched" sections
Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video, follow each others... I'd say 100% redis wouldn't work any more
As far as I know, Youporn is all about users posting videos (whereby amateur porn is probably only a small part of all uploads, I guess)
Follow each other? I'm not sure you know what the point of a porn website is.
Say I'm a fan of a porn star XXX and I'd like to see a simple notification that there's recently a new video tagging her. Same thing if I like some particular user's taste for porn and would like to get noticed if he/she has posted a video. Basically if it gets more social, my wall or dashboard or whatever, would be more sorta relevant.
/briefly worked at last.fm
Or the good old' NFS?
How do you handle where to put the files on which disks? do you write custom software or there's some sort of off-the-shelf software to do this?
The reason I asked about this is because it looked like a few people I talked to seem to prefer to use Distributed File System such as HBase, GlusterFS or something else so that they don't have to write extra code.
And I'm guessing you back them all up on daily base as well?
Like I said, nothing fancy but it works without any issues (apart from a small delay when you have to copy the file to 2 or 3 different servers (redundancy) before it becomes available, but it's not a big problem but I have few ideas how to solve that if it becomes one :)).
Wish you all the best to hit and solve that problem (meaning you'll be successful by that time I'm guessing (^_^)).
What I'm saying is that there is more than it meets the eye.