DATABASE TRENDS AND APPLICATIONS: TERRACOTTA TAKES CENTER STAGE AT PREMIÈRES LOGES - Originally Published in Database Trends and Applications Magazine on November 8, 2007
With Terracotta in Place, Software Vendor is Confident in Its Ability to Scale
San Francisco—Premières Loges, a new online event ticketing software vendor based in Montreal, launched its solution in February, 2006, with an implementation for Théâtre St-Denis also in Montreal. Almost a year later, Premières Loges incorporated technology from Terracotta, a provider of enterprise Java scalability solutions, into its mix to shore up availability and scalability.
With tickets for a Norah Jones concert at the theater about to go on sale, the upgraded system was expected to be put under the spotlight itself. But it didn't miss a beat as Premières Loges, using Terracotta technology, successfully hosted sales for the blockbuster event. In the 20 minutes after tickets became available, 2,218 tickets were sold, Francois Lacoursiere, vice president and CTO of Premières Loges, told DBTA. Premières Loges chose Terracotta for its simplicity and low total cost of implementation. "We wanted to be able to increase the throughput of the application," said Lacoursiere. "We liked the idea of the non-intrusive solution they have."
Lacoursiere and his partner Mathieu Dupuis, who is president and co-CTO, founded the company in 2001 with a dedication to using open source technology throughout the stack. They sought a clustering solution that could complement Spring and Tomcat, which are the foundation of its lightweight approach to development. On the database side, the company is using Postgres as well as the Sequoia Project.
While the company's selection of Terracotta hinged on its ability to provide high availability without intrusion into the code base of their flagship application, there were other factors in the decision. They found that Terracotta's JVM-level clustering disseminates fine-grained changes only to nodes that reference changed objects, an approach they considered better than that of alternatives that move around coarser-grained changes to all nodes via multi-cast.
According to Lacoursiere, the Norah Jones concert put no stress on the system, and, in fact, the company found that it was at the Web tier that it needed to cluster more. "For that concert we clusterized the back end," said Lacoursiere, "but then after doing that, our bottleneck moved up front to the Web tier, which was not Terracottaized," he explained. "Now we are using Terracotta on the front end, as well."
The Terracotta team has been "amazing" to work with, said Lacoursiere. It is for the most part a drop-in solution, he said, although there is some rewrite of code needed to optimize the locking. "Terracotta knew that that was the key part for having proper performance so they really gave us a big hand on that aspect."
Premières Loges handles half a million ticket sales a year for Théâtre St- Denis, and has just signed on its second customer. " Ticketing software is not something you buy on a daily basis. It is not like buying word processing software. It is more like changing your accounting system since it is at the core of your business so getting customers is more involved in terms of process than other kinds of software," Lacoursiere said. But with the Terracotta piece in place, the company is confident about its solution's ability to scale. When the Norah Jones tickets went on sale, out of caution, Lacoursiere said, " We voluntarily choked the system and we increased it every five minutes, giving more people access." However, he noted, the architecture can support sales of in excess of 100,000 tickets per hour with a cluster of Terracotta enabled machines.
