Case Study: Yap.TV achieves a scalable, resilient high-performance backend with Akka

Yap.TV Goes Reactive

Yap.TV, a social guide for TV and iTunes, faced growing pain as its original Ruby backend struggled under peak traffic and an increasing volume of background imports. Server performance and scalability issues during prime time degraded the user experience and forced engineers to spend more time on operations than on new features, creating an urgent need for a performant, easy-to-program concurrent architecture.

Working with SoftwareMill, Yap.TV re‑engineered its backend on the Typesafe Reactive Platform—using Scala, Akka and Spray.io—gradually replacing congested REST endpoints, building actor-based data pipelines for asynchronous imports, and integrating search and recommendation components. The result is a high-performance, resilient and scalable platform with faster development cycles, reliable error recovery and automated deployments (multiple times per day) that handles increased traffic and new problem domains with no downtime.

Yap.Tv

Trevor Stout

CEO