Dailymotion

Dailymotion, i of the earth'due south largest independent video amusement website, is now powered by symfony. Dailymotion is amid the top 60 websites worldwide. In December 2008, more than than 41,ix million unique users visited the website and they viewed more 922 million online videos (source: comScore, Dec 2008). Dailymotion is as well the number ii French site in the world.

Dailymotion

Founded in 2005, the Dailymotion website has always been powered by PHP and managed past a squad of in-house developers. Over the years, a custom framework has been developed to power the platform.

But mid-2008, they decided to motion abroad from their domicile-made framework and drift to an Open-Source framework.

Dailymotion by the numbers

What to know all the nitty-gritty details of the Dailymotion architecture? Here are some interesting numbers:

  • 50 PHP machines serving nigh 5000 PHP pages per second
  • 17 DB machines
  • 30 memcache machines for a total of 210 Gb of memory storage
  • threescore Gb/southward of bandwidth
  • i.ii petabytes of storage

And that does not business relationship for the machines that encode the videos, host the search engine, ... All in all, they take more than than 430 machines!

Why migrate to an Open up-Source framework?

Even if Dailymotion has more than x developers dedicated to the website development, they wanted to be more focused on their business concern, instead of being forced to maintain a framework.

Over time, they started to feel the hurting of maintaining their own framework: the maintenance of the framework itself started to accept way too much time: calculation new features, documenting them, training new developers, keep everything coherent, etc...

Past choosing an Open-Source framework with a large customs, they free themselves from everything other than their business.

Olivier Poitrey, one of the co-founder and CTO of Dailymotion, sums upwards the main advantages of moving to a framework:

  • Don't reinvent the cycle
  • Maintain less code
  • Meliorate compliance to coding conventions
  • Implement new processes like unit/functional testing easily

Why symfony?

Thanks to the inventiveness of their marketing department, the Dailymotion developers add together new features on a nearly everyday basis. And so, rewriting the website from scratch was out of question. They merely could not have afforded to stop all new developments, waiting for the new lawmaking base of operations to exist finished.

They needed a way to migrate step past footstep from the old code base to the new one, and continue adding new features at the same time. And symfony was the ideal candidate. Why?

Beginning, because the symfony framework is 1 of the most well-known PHP frameworks, and one used past many high-traffic websites.

So, the framework is well decoupled, meaning that each component can be used by itself, without the whole framework.

Eventually, the other big selling point of symfony was its flexibility. It is very easy to override the default behaviors or add together new ones if needed. And that's exactly what they needed.

The migration procedure

The principal challenge of the migration process was to avoid breaking too many things past introducing small doses of symfony.

The offset change was to make symfony handle the request, dispatch information technology to the old lawmaking, become dorsum the response content, and ship dorsum the response to the browser. Wrapping the existing code was fabricated possible by using the symfony 2.0 sfRequestHandler class. Nosotros decided to use symfony two.0 for its raw speed, even if it is not public yet.

By the mode, that is the archetype procedure of the symfony framework evolution. Sensio Labs uses symfony for its customers and a lot of new features are added based on their needs and feedback. For the Dailymotion migration, Sensio Labs helped Dailymotion ascertain the migration strategy and the target architecture.

The adjacent step was the migration of the mod_rewrite rules to the symfony routing. Cheers to the great flexibility of the Symfony routing, Dailymotion has been able to extend the default behavior to fit its unique needs: object parameters, labeled variables, segment group, capricious ordered optional segments, centralized formats, ...

Forth the style, the Dailymotion team contributed dorsum lawmaking to the symfony community. Some lawmaking has already been committed and is already available as part of the symfony i.2 release. Another enhancements are proposed as tickets.

One of the other big changes was the introduction of massive unit and functional tests. To migrate with conviction, more than 5000 unit of measurement and functional tests have been written, using lime and the symfony test browser.

During phase one, the following components of symfony has been used:

Components used during phase 1

What's next?

Even if the Dailymotion website has only been powered by symfony for less than a calendar week, the adjacent migration steps are already planned:

  • Introduction of symfony controllers
  • Usage of symfony's facilities like sfI18n, sfUser, sfCookieSessionStorage, ...
  • Usage of symfony's 2.0 service container
  • Usage of symfony's model system (Doctrine)

Are you lot still using YouTube for your videos? I call up it's fourth dimension we all switch to Dailymotion ;)