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MySpace and Its Growing Infrastructure

Baseline tracks the growth of the Web infrastructure for MySpace, the massive social networking site.

The incredible growth of MySpace has tested the infrastructure of the social networking site, which has constantly refreshed its equipment and technology to keep pace. Baseline has an interesting story that tracks the growth of MySpace and its infrastructure, based on an interview with Jim Benedetto, MySpace's vice president of technology, at a recent conference. Here's an interesting excerpt:

One problem is that MySpace is pushing Microsoft's Web technologies into territory that only Microsoft itself has begun to explore, Benedetto says. As of November, MySpace was exceeding the number of simultaneous connections supported by SQL Server, causing the software to crash. The specific circumstances that trigger one of these crashes occur only about once every three days, but it's still frequent enough to be annoying, according to Benedetto.

Last summer we tracked the power outages at the Garland Building in Los Angeles that led to lengthy downtime for MySpace. Apparently in 2003 the site had problems when internal network traffic reached a volume that it was triggering anti-DDoS measures. As with the recent scalability study on eBay, there may well be information in the MySpace experience that can help others dealing with rapid audience growth.