Marktplaats leveraging XAP’s dynamic scalability to meet growth without needing to re-architecture the system
New York – September 9, 2009 – eBay’s Marktplaats.nl, with 6.5 million unique visits per month, has chosen GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) to support its advertising platform because of XAP’s performance, scalability, and hardware efficiency.
“The transaction speed XAP is delivering for our ad engine Admarkt is great,” says Cees de Groot, lead architect at Marktplaats. “XAP lets us serve up 500 page views per second, each containing 50 ads – providing 25,000 ad impressions per second on a single laptop. With these speeds, we’ll probably need only a dozen or so machines to handle our current load, with room to spare – down from several hundred servers in our current data center.”
XAP will be eliminating data bottlenecks and parallelizing processing, resulting in improved performance, increased server consolidation, and a reduction in licensing fees. The overall cost-savings is substantial but is only one part of the story.
At any moment, Marketplaats has more than 5 million ads live on the site and is visited 61 million times per month. With an average of 17 page views per visit, this translates to more than billion page views per month. Marktplaats expects traffic to grow over the next few years and is using GigaSpaces XAP to prepare.
“With XAP’s on-demand scalability, we can add more and more commodity servers gradually to meet growth,” continues de Groot. “We can simply plug them into the cluster with no re-architecture or even configuration changes. Because XAP is linearly scalable, I know in advance that I need only to multiply the number of servers by the percentage increase in traffic.”
XAP is supporting the Marktplaats Admarkt platform, its home-grown pay-per-click ad engine and classifieds application, which provides the top advertisers on every results page, click-fraud protection, and a backend console offering specific overviews and statistics for each ad.
Marktplaats chose GigaSpaces XAP because of the breadth and simplicity of its solution; it communicates with load balancers, increases efficiency within virtualized environments, and its clear APIs make concurrent programming easy. Once choosing XAP, it took Marktplaats only days for installation.
Within Admarkt, XAP is being used as a single middleware platform providing data, messaging, processing, high availability, and deployment; it also runs the site’s web container. This combination of functionality makes software maintenance and operation easily manageable not only within the current environment and load levels but also at 5 to 10 times those levels.
The Admarkt project is the first phase of a larger initiative to implement XAP across all Marktplaats systems. “It looks like this whole effort, including development hours and GigaSpaces licensing, can pay off in around two years,” concludes de Groot. “This will save us a lot of hardware. Our pessimistic estimates bring us to 50% savings.”
About Marktplaats
Marktplaats.nl, founded in 1999, was one of the first websites focused on classified ads. Since its establishment, the company has become the most popular website in this area in the Netherlands with a still-growing customer base of individuals and (small) businesses. Per day, more than 255,000 new ads are placed on the website, from clothing and collectibles to cars and services. The company since November 2004 is part of eBay. Marketplace is located in Emmeloord.
About GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of application platforms for Java and .Net environments that offer an alternative to traditional application servers. Its flagship product, XAP 7.0, is an enterprise-grade application server for deploying and scaling distributed applications under any requirement.
GigaSpaces customers depending on our reliability and millisecond latency include many of the Fortune 100 companies, the world’s top investment banks, financial exchanges, telecommunications carriers, Web-commerce companies, online gaming companies, and Internet media organizations. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Tricode is GigaSpaces’ strategic partner in the Benelux, www.gigaspaces.nl.
For more information, please visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, our blog at http://blog.gigaspaces.com