How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

The ratio of data reads to writes 3:1, which is an incredibly high write rate. A majority of the requests hitting the backend for FarmVille in some way modifies the state of the user playing the game. To make this scalable, we have worked to make our application interact primarily with cache components. Additionally, the release of new content and features tends to cause usage spikes since we are effectively extending the game. The load spikes can be as large as 50% the day of a new feature’s release. We have to be able to accommodate this spikey traffic.
(Link: How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month)