Stateful Application Server

The talk is about a stateful application server built on top of JRuby/JVM. We at Wooga have built and evaluated such an application server, and now I want to share the learnings and obstacles that came up during development.

Scaling up: We aim to fully utilize our available hardware. One box has 32 Cores and more than 32GB RAM available. How to saturate such beasts? Well, since JRuby supports real Threads we can share state (uh oh!) and saturate cores.

Scaling out: What are the options for scaling a stateful application server? How to shard state across many servers safely?

I aim for a talk that gives useful tips and shows code. Basically a ratio between 30% background information, 70% showcasing.

The talk will cover the following topics:

Safely sharing state in a concurrent environment using JRuby
Using Java concurrency utils in JRuby
Practical tips for planning out deployments
Practical tips for calculating static shards by performance

Transcript