☄️ Pufferfish, please scale the site!

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2021-07-22 12:00:05

We created Team Pufferfish about a year ago with a specific goal: to avert the MySQL apocalypse! The MySQL apocalypse would occur when so many students would work on quizzes simultaneously that even the largest MySQL database AWS has on offer would not be able to cope with the load, bringing the site to a halt.

A little over a year ago, we forecasted our growth and load-tested MySQL to find out how much wiggle room we had. In the worst case (because we dislike apocalypses), or in the best case (because we like growing), we would have about a year’s time. This meant we needed to get going!

Looking back on our work now, the most important lesson we learned was the importance of timely and precise feedback at every step of the way. At times we built short-lived tooling and process to support a particular step forward. This made us so much faster in the long run.

Clear from the start, Team Pufferfish would need to make some pretty fundamental changes to the Quiz Engine, the component responsible for most of the MySQL load. Somehow the Quiz Engine would need to significantly reduce its load on MySQL.

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