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Introduction

Comcast Corporation is probably the greatest companies of entertainment, material and communication programs and providers, with around 24 million cable shoppers, 15 million high-speed Net shoppers, and 6.5 million mobile shoppers. Its Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) division is chartered to grow and expand the company’s Net establishments. CIM’s Fancast.coman wide-ranging on-line video clip assortment of tv exhibits, films, trailers and clipsgets around 10 million original end users per month. Users can browse and search across the site’s 4M+ material goods to find the entertainment they want.

Requirements/Challenges
Meet overall performance target of 20ms per query at peak load, and scale to one million original end users per day
Supply simple search interface, while keeping deep customizability
Low fixed & operational costs
Deliver complete functional search features

Comcast Corporation is probably the greatest companies of entertainment, material and communication programs and providers, with around 24 million cable shoppers, 15 million high-speed Net shoppers, and 6.5 million mobile shoppers. Its Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) division is chartered to grow and expand the company’s Net establishments. CIM’s Fancast.coman wide-ranging on-line video clip assortment of tv exhibits, films, trailers and clipsgets around 10 million original end users per month. Users can browse and search across the site’s 4M+ material goods to find the entertainment they want.

Challenges

Search is critical to Fancast’s business objectives — getting end users to all the media material they want, as quickly and intuitively as possible. The search implementation had to meet three key troubles:
one. Supply a simple search interface, ideally 1 simple box without sacrificing deep customizability, to constantly meet and exceed user needs without exposing them directly to material complexity
2. Handle massive material scale literally all TV and entertainment material – at scales responsive to mass market traffic and reach.
3. Achieve decreased fixed and operational costs in terms of dedicated development and support staff, and minimal additional hardware.

Functional and cyndi.communique-de-prese.com Overall performance Conditions

Fancast uses metadata from many different 3rd party sources such as IMDB.com (the Net Movie Database) and Tribune Media Service. Each of these 3rd party sources has its own specific format, as well as differing material refresh schedules, and none includes a comprehensive metadata store with consistent data and descriptions. For example, the official Hollywood hntrends.com Spider-Man movie titles from Marvell Enjoyment use two hyphenated words, but most end users enter them as 1 word, with no hyphen.

The ability to present an authoritative index was not only essential to the user experience, but also a key differentiator for the best search experience. Users searching Jessica Simpson probably don’t want to end up with Homer Simpson.

In terms of overall performance, the goal was to expand from 50,000 to one million peak original visitors per day around 16 months. To ensure candidate search technologies could meet this goal, CIM defined a clear scaling metric, with search query response under 20ms/query at peak load, at the same order of magnitude as for website interactions. Scaling and capacity targets were also set at the application server level so that a single physical application server could host multiple server instances, each with a similar scaling profile. This also simplified sizing prerequisites for the operations team for calculating how many servers would be needed for a given number of end users.

Testing & Evaluation

CIM shortlisted two search alternatives: Solr, the Lucene search server; and a large well-known commercial search product. To pick the finalist, they created a test-bed with indexes of both two million and four million documents deployed on each of your Sun x64 servers running Red Hat Linux. To review the results and optimize the Solr Lucene search infrastructure, CIM hired Lucid Imagination. Consultants from the commercial vendor did the same with their solution. The CIM team benchmarked query response rates at different load levels, ranging from 100 to 1500 requests per second, as well as stress tests at failure envelope points.

The result: Solr outperformed the commercial alternative search solution both in terms of response rates as well as failure-handling characteristics. There was no question that adaptsol Solr could meet the targets set for overall performance.

CIM also compiled a list of 180 functional features for comparison. In addition to its superior overall performance, Solr also came out ahead on functions and cost of ownership to meet CIM’s business objectives.

The Choice For Solr

Solr made the final cut based on:
Overall performance and scalability advantages
Required search features
Organizational fit
Total Cost of Ownership
Active Solr/Lucene open source development community
Other large organizations that “bet the company” successfully on Solr (CNET, Netflix, MySpace, Orbitz)

In addition to the availability of community and commercial support, CIM benefited from the deep expertise in search offered by Lucid Imagination to configure their Solr implementation in accordance with best practices, and to optimize scalability.

“Hiring Lucid Imagination took a significant potential platform that our people liked, and turned it into a reliable, high-performance platform that really satisfied our business leadership.” Ranga Muvavarirwa, Director Product Planning, Comcast Interactive Media