mspace architecture (Score 1)

My space has been growin at 260,000 people per day. It's hosted on 150 servers down from 250 servers. http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2006/0 3-20MIX.asp MySpace has 65 million registered members, and that's growing at 260,000 members every day. In February we had 38 million unique views, and 23 billion page views. In fact, Media Metrics tells us that we're the No. 2-trafficked site on the Internet, passing Google, eBay, and just recently MSN. Sorry about that, Bill. Bill can take comfort in knowing that we've achieved these numbers using SQL Server 2005, and also ASP.NET 2.0. (Applause.) So right around the time that we started MySpace we took a look at some other social networking sites on the Internet, Friendster was blowing up, but it was just a dating site. There were some other sites out there that were geared towards business, classifieds, we wanted to do something different, we wanted something for everybody. Our vision was to become a next-generation portal that empowers people to speak for themselves, and do whatever they want. So we gathered all the cool features that we saw on the Internet, and we brought them together, and integrated them into our social networking platform. Music is one of the best examples of things to become incredibly popular on MySpace. So let's take a look at some of the technical milestones we've hit with Microsoft. We've been around for 2-1/2 years. Since the beginning we've had to make continuous changes to keep up with the growth. MySpace has primarily relied on Microsoft technologies, for both the operating system and for the database and development platform. On our way to 65 million members we started off with a simple backend architecture, but we quickly realized a lot more was needed for us to stay alive. Our first big win was at 9 million members when we converted parts of MySpace over to ASP.net. We immediately saw huge performance gains, specifically on the CPU. With ASP.net our developers are also able to take advantage of the true object oriented programming nature that C# provides. At 17 million members we deployed a large-scale dynamic caching engine in ASP.net. We were able to get 92 percent cache hit rates, which greatly reduced the amount of load on our databases. We were also using a 64-bit version of ASP.net, so we can load up our servers with a huge amount of RAM, which reduced the number of servers we had to put in the data center. SQL Server has been core to MySpace since the beginning. We were early adopters of SQL Server 2005, and in testing we found that there were huge performance benefits in it. We had SQL Server in production before it was officially released, and it relieved a lot of performance bottlenecks in the MySpace architecture.