Shaina Noelle P.

Amandoron BSA 2B

Lesson 3 Assignment 8 – ESPN

1. How many requests from users does ESPN receive each second? Do you think this is a consistent
pattern or does it have peaks and valleys? When does it peak?
 At espn.com, they literally received tens of thousands request per second from diverse users.
The patterns of request were not consistent and I think it does have peaks especially when there
are World Cups or huge events of sports for instance.
2. Why ESPN store personal information and preferences on its databases and how does this personal
information complicate the ability of ESPN to respond to requests from users? Why can’t ESPN just use
Web page caching to handle the loads?
 As they received ton of thousands request per second, the scale of request resulted to a heavy
reliance on web page caching which as for ESPN it is a critical approach and won’t work for
personalized content. Instead, ESPN store the private information and preferences on its
databases to have a personalize offer. It complicates a little bit because it has to respond for each
consumer and they are millions of users.
3. How much information on users does ESPN store? Why does this pose a challenge for ESPN? Can’t
they just use a standard 1 terabyte hard drive from a PC? Why can’t they use a single PC?
 The ESPN com need to store over ten million of users, and as on average of each user, it has five
kilobytes of data. As a million of information from diverse users that they need to restore, a
single PC won’t able to handle it because the information they put on a computer has to follow up
in all the other devices the user is using.
4. What platforms do ESPN customers use when accessing their Web sites, and how does this further
complicate ESPN’s processing picture?
 Consumers may use the mobile websites “espn.com” with the particular sports they want to
watch or through with the application. As for ESPN, it is complicated as they need to adapt for
each platform according to what the consumer wants.
5. What are the key components in ESPN’s solution? Describe the function of each.
 They come up with a personalization DB presenting two new exotic components: the grid and
the composer. For the first component, the grid, it uses an IBM WebSphere extreme scale. It’s
extremely fast as it can load twelve million fans with forty percent room to grow and it has no
sweat to handle for over fifteen thousand of requests per second and it has a low CPU usage. On
the other hand, the composer, its facades the complexity of dealing with all the services of ESPN.
The request that comes from the composer will goes by to the grid then it goes to the existing
services and by that it will get to the personalized content the user asking for.
6. Why is scalability so important to ESPN?
 Scalability is important for most of entities especially when they want to introduce their product
to the market. The scalability of ESPN’s solution takes up only three months from inception to
production. This is important for ESPN because it permits to keep their place in the market
especially their product and follow what the actual trends available in the market.