Sessions at EuroPython 2011 about Spotify

Monday 20th June 2011

• Spotify and Python: love at first sight

  by Jon Åslund

  This is a story about how Spotify started, how we evolved, where we are today and how Python has always been a big part of our success. Where do we use it? Where do we not use it? Learn about the Unix way and the Debian way of maintaining a healthy love for Python, while two-timing with other languages such as Java and C++.

  • Python
  • Spotify

  At 12:30pm to 1:15pm, Monday 20th June

  Coverage video

Wednesday 22nd June 2011

• Spotify: Horizontal scalability for great success

  by Nick Barkas

  If you run on CPython, it's not possible to get a single-process, multithreaded Python program to use more than one CPU core at a time because of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). A common way of dealing with this is to run one instance of a Python program for each core a machine has and spread the load amongst those processes. This forces developers to write simple, stateless programs that naturally scale out to many many servers when needed, while also not having to think about things like locking and thread scheduling.

  I'll discuss some tools and methods Spotify's backend uses for managing multiple identical server processes as well as load balancing with DNS, proxy servers, and using hashing to send repeated requests to the same process. I will also talk about the difficulties that arise when you really need to share data or state between processes, and how they can be dealt with.

  • Python
  • Scaling
  • Spotify

  At 11:15am to 12:15pm, Wednesday 22nd June

  Coverage video