by RMD
16. January 2007 20:18
I came across an article today that discusses the technology behind one of the largest sites on the web. You may have heard of it. It's called MySpace.com.
Personally, I hate MySpace. It offers me absolutely nothing I don't already have. I already have my own web page and blog. I already have messaging via Trillian (AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc.) I have no desire to judge my own self worth via how many people are on my "friend's list". Etc.
On the occasion I've browsed to a MySpace page I've had an uncontrollable desire to vomit thanks to the world's worst web page designs. I mean, come on... for the love of baby jesus don't give people the ability to automatically play music and have an animated background. It physically hurts. Please, stop.
Anyway, regardless of my distaste for the services it offers, how it offers those services is actually pretty neat. The article goes into all the growing pains the company experienced as it passed 500,000 users, 2 million users, 10 million users, all the way up to 20 million users.
In summary, they use ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server 2005. Their head developer has lots of praise for Microsoft and the platforms it provides. He mentions how they almost cut in half the number of servers they needed when they migrated their application from ColdFusion to ASP.NET.
What was particularly interesting is how they dealt with scaling the database tier. For any serious developer, this is a problem you have faced or will face in the near future. Case studies like these can save you months of work and millions of dollars.
Ironically this was posted on Slashdot, which is not the most Microsoft friendly site in the world. I'm fairly sure nobody fully read the article because the comments section hasn't mentioned Microsoft once yet. (As of about 8:15 PM EST.)