Project Overview:

Neighborhood is an implementation of Zillow's property view "Neighborhood" section from scratch. This project is an evolution of a legacy commentary system that sought to replicate Zillow's Neighborhood component.

This application builds on the legacy project by introducing a number of improvements:

• 🚀 Transition from SQLite to a more robust and scalable MongoDB database
• 👍 Server and client enhancements to handle extreme bursts in concurrent requests
  • Completely revamped client-side code that behaves well when positioned behind a load balancer such as Nginx
  • Implementation of an in-memory cache using the memory-cache node module

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Requirements
3. Usage
4. Environment Variables

Overview

Client Interface:

Stress tests:

• Database server hosted on a single EC2 t2.micro
  • 10 million neighborhood records
• Node.js component server hosted on 3 EC2 t2.micros load balanced with Nginx

1. Each request is a GET request for a random API endpoint (a neighborhoods with id between 1 and 10,000,000)

3000 Requests Per Second Over 1 minute Seconds (3% Error Rate)

2. Making a get request to a single api endpoint that represents a neighborhood with a single id

4000 Requests Per Second Over 1 minute Seconds (7.04% Error Rate)

Requirements

• Node v10.13.0 (LTS as of May 2019) or higher
• MongoDB for the database server

Usage

Server

1. Install dependencies with npm install
2. After connecting to the database, from the root directory run npm run seedDatabase
3. The main server file is server/server.js -- If nodemon is already installed globally (it is not part of the dependencies), you may start the server via npm run server-dev for development purposes or npm start for production -- The server uses port 3009 by default, but you may set it using an environment variable process.env.PORT

Client

The client side is built using Webpack:

npm run dev: Builds the client-side files in development mode and does not do full bundling. This also activates watch mode by default so it rebuilds whenever you make and save changes

npm run build: Builds the client-side files in production mode, with full bundling. This reduces file size, but is less useful in debugging (some errors do not provide as much detail as in development mod

• Slide deck of more results found here!