Building huge websites

Inside Myspace.com
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  • Membership Milestones:

  • 500,000 Users: A Simple Architecture Stumbles

  • 1 Million Users:Vertical Partitioning Solves Scalability Woes

  • 3 Million Users: Scale-Out Wins Over Scale-Up

  • 9 Million Users: Site Migrates to ASP.NET, Adds Virtual Storage

  • 26 Million Users: MySpace Embraces 64-Bit Technology

  • Wow, if you’re into reading about massively scalable websites, and I am, this is a great article. The numbers Myspace is running up against are just insane. I’m extremely surprised to learn they run everything off of Windows servers with MS SQL Server databases. Their Windows admins’ lives must just be hell. I’m biased though (having a vital Windows2000 server completely die for no reason after a reboot to install an important security patch will do that to you) so they could sleep like babies for all I know. I do wonder how much more they could do with the equivalent Linux servers running Mysql or Postgres. Based on my somewhat limited experience, a lot more. But I’m sure Windows fans would argue, they do that. :)

    [tags]myspace,architecture,windows,linux,scalability[/tags]