Digital Video

Top Television Network

Technology Service: Performance Engineering, and Flex Development

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client 4 years ago and continues to be engaged today. At one point, Gorilla Logic had 10 people working on various projects, many positioned in technical leadership roles. These projects included Video Players, Publishing Experience (CMS), Social Media, Advanced TV Services, Site UI and Design Services. The Social Media Application had to be built to dynamically scale to handle significant spikes in load with throughput up to 3Gbps. They needed the ability to spin up and ramp down as demand fluctuated. Therefore as part of this effort, GL also designed and deployed a private cloud for this client. The custom Video Distribution and Content Player were built with the ability to facilitate ad insertion and interfacing with the ad inventory system. Additional features included viewer tracking and timing. This effort included backend transcoding, work flow and approval processes.

International Financial Authority: On-line News Site

Technology Service: Architectural Assessment, Performance Engineering and Code/System Modernization to Achieve Unprecedented Scale.

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client for 2 years beginning in 2007. The summer of 2007, during one of the largest financial crashes in United States history, this client, that provides real-time financial information, had their website traffic increase by a factor of 4. The client’s website had an average of 5-million hits a day. However, when the stock market had one of its worst reportings on a Friday at close of business, investors became desperate for financial information as they contemplated what to do with their investments. Traffic jumped to 20-million that following Monday.

Gorilla Logic was called in with urgency to revamp the website and backend systems to support this added demand for information. Gorilla Logic brought in an experienced team of lead architects to redesign and enhance the performance across the clients web distribution systems for their .com site. This client had numerous complex systems including a content side, publication side and content management system (CMS) side. The vast amount of content came from 3 sources: editorial content, market information such as quotes, and syndicated financial news such as stock picking. All of this content was delivered via end user applications with heavy Java backends.

In addition to the vast amount of numerical and text data, there was also a significant video component that needed to be created, cut, and syndicated to be delivered to the website along with meta data. A separate stream was used for this high volume video that was delivered and cached via Akami worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Gorilla Logic’s roll was to lead the strategy to improve delivery of all of this content through their .com website. This work included solving garbage collection in Java Virtual Machines (JVM) servers, caching, building new indexing capabilities, and fine-tuning databases for optimum performance. Gorilla Logic was responsible for the performance engineering from the quality of the lowest levels of code to the data infrastructure. This work had a specific focus on market and end user data including authentication and all things related to subscribers. The technologies included Java, J2EE, Drupal, and PHP. Client-side technologies included HTML5, Java Script, Flash, and JQuery. The CMS was Microsofts proprietary solution. Gorilla Logic was also in charge of the historical pricing databases. Initially, these systems only handled US quotes, but as part of this effort, they were expanded to handle the International quoting system as well.

The results were improved inbound and outbound syndication from 25-minute latency to 3 minutes from when a story was received, repackaged and sent out. In order to reach this performance, on-line news databases had to be rebuilt along with the finely tuned search engines. The meta-data taxotomy for categorizing was also enhanced. Video CMS and search capabilities expanded full-text searches of not only text tracks, but to video and audio transcription as well. Video syndication was improved through a modernized platform, and integration of CMS out to Akamai. Lastly, Gorilla Logic reviewed and made architectural recommendations on their video flash player to accommodate ad insertion.