In an April blog post, Supporting Millions of Players at ROBLOX, we mapped out ROBLOX’s back-end web technology. Today, Gigi Sayfan discusses message queuing, a single component nestled in our greater web infrastructure, and how it helps us accelerate updates to our huge catalog and the user-account search function. He also offers practical advice on setting up a message queuing application for a specific set of goals.

In a common, distributed web application architecture, multiple web servers talk directly to a database and/or to back-end services that relay messages to the database. ROBLOX has millions of users, who constantly bombard our many web servers with requests that eventually funnel into the database. If the database is busy, it will be slow to respond to requests – both from the web servers and back-end services – and the user experience will suffer. Worst case scenario, requests time out.

Continue reading