Open Source Secrets: The Architecture Behind a Successful
Virtual Goods BusinessTimothy Fitz – IMVU Inc.
An online community where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create, and play
What’s IMVU?
Company Overview
Founded in April, 2004
Based in Palo Alto, CA
70 employees
3 institutional rounds
$30M raised
0
10
20
30
40
45M
Dec-05
Jun-06
Dec-06
Jun-07
Dec-07
Jun-08
Dec-08
Jun-09
Oct-09
3D avatars
Virtual goods
45M registered users
10M uniques/month
$30M+ revenue run rate
Profitable
Cumulative Registrations
Snapshot
Registered Users
User-Generated Content
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0M
06/04
12/04
06/05
12/05
06/06
12/06
06/07
12/07
06/08
12/08
06/09
3 Million Virtual Items
Celebrating with Mohawks
Shameless Promotional Plug
We’re Hiring!www.imvu.com/jobs
Overview
Development Process Server Architecture Client Architecture
Always Be Shipping
Client: 1-2 releases/dayWebsite: 35-50 release/day
Ship Incremental Value
Always Release Ready
QA can’t afford to repeat themselves.
Write tests for everything.
No tests? Not done.
Tests are a contract.
Commit. Go Green. Push.Repeat.
Cluster
Scaled up LAMP stack All state in memcache/MySQL No instance servers Dumb message bus for realtime
Cluster Size
365 Apache nodes 89 MySQL nodes 107 Memcache nodes 102 Perlbal nodes 22 Mogile disk nodes 15 solr nodes
Before…
HTML/JS
Not HTML/JS
Client Code by Language
Language Lines
C++ 168k
Python 129k
Javascript 36k
HTML 24k
CSS 13k
Shameless Promotional Plug
We’re Hiring!www.imvu.com/jobs