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