Scaling MySpace: Treading Water in a Tsunami

Those of you that that enjoyed my post on Stability, Agility, Scalability and Cost: The eBay example are sure to like this technical interview of the desperate efforts to stay only a bit behind the traffic demands at MySpace, written by David Carr at Baseline Magazine

Some take-aways:

“The thing is, it provides so much of a benefit to people that the errors and glitches we find are forgivable.” If the site is down or malfunctioning one day, he simply comes back the next and picks up where he left off, Tanner says.

Hmm, that sounds a tad different to the eBay database use case, no?!

Standard database server configuration consists of Hewlett-Packard HP 585 servers with 4 AMD Opteron dual-core, 64-bit processors with 64 gigabytes of memory (recently upgraded from 32). The operating system is Windows 2003, Service Pack 1; the database software is Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Service Pack 1. There’s a 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet network card, plus two host bus adapters for storage area network communications. The infrastructure for the core user profiles application includes 65 of these database servers with a total capacity of more than 2 terabytes of memory, 520 processors and 130 gigabytes of network throughput. Source: MySpace.com user conference presentations

A worthy read for those of you interested in the lofty heights of database scaling, where we pack oxygen and have to make some choices and compromises along the way. And often being forced to discard niceties such as

“[…] business logic in database”

… along the way! :-)

Disclaimer: Fox Interactive Media is a customer of Pythian’s, however we manage the IGN properties and Fox Sports environments only at this juncture. [Check out the Pythian attribution footers on IGN.com the other IGN properties Rotten Tomatoes, Ask Men, etc.] As much as I’d love to have a crack at the MySpace database challenges, so far they have not been sent our way.