I am happy to announce that Snagajob is now using Yii to power our desktop and mobile sites.
Desktop Site - www.snagajob.com
Mobile Site - m.snagajob.com
So far, performance has proven to be great with server response times between .05 and .08 seconds. This blew away the existing site which was closer to .25 and the new site is running on less servers and 1/3 of the total memory. In fact, during rollout we dropped half of the boxes as a test and still saw no decline in performance. The attached image shows response times from the morning through our peak traffic hours with the only blip (if 200ms is a blip) not due to Yii.
Utilizing themes we were able to deliver both sites by only modifying the views. In fact, many pages use the same desktop view on mobile and only load a different layout file. Themes also ensure our users will never have a slimmed down mobile experience and drastically reduced the time required to build a separate mobile site.
Savvy users may notice we still have .aspx extensions. The goal of this project was to improve speed and put us on a platform allowing for faster development in the future so we simply rebuilt the existing site, urls and all, to mitigate any impact to SEO. Yii’s routing engine made this extremely easy and will allow us to strategically implement new urls over time.