Sexy Jihad

Well, to keep a long story short: it doesn’t. While I am not a fan of myspace (pick a reason):

1. it’s an ugly bitch
2. it doesn’t adhere to web standards
3. it’s badly designed technically
4. it has a horrible interface
5. all morons and attention seekers seem to be perpetually drawn to it

I could go on and on, but that isn’t the point of this posting. Baselinemag has written a comprehensive analysis of how myspace actually works and how it has scaled since it’s grown. To me it’s mostly an example of how NOT to design a website:

Booming traffic demands put a constant stress on the social network’s computing infrastructure. Yet, MySpace developers have repeatedly redesigned the Web site software, database and storage systems in an attempt to keep pace with exploding growth - the site now handles almost 40 billion page views a month. Most corporate Web sites will never have to bear more than a small fraction of the traffic MySpace handles, but anyone seeking to reach the mass market online can learn from its experience.

……..

Benedetto candidly admits that 100% reliability is not necessarily his top priority. “That’s one of the benefits of not being a bank, of being a free service,” he says.
In other words, on MySpace the occasional glitch might mean the Web site loses track of someone’s latest profile update, but it doesn’t mean the site has lost track of that person’s money. “That’s one of the keys to the Web site’s performance, knowing that we can accept some loss of data,” Benedetto says. So, MySpace has configured SQL Server to extend the time between the “checkpoints” operations it uses to permanently record updates to disk storage—even at the risk of losing anywhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours of data—because this tweak makes the database run faster.

Similarly, Benedetto’s developers still often go through the whole process of idea, coding, testing and deployment in a matter of hours, he says. That raises the risk of introducing software bugs, but it allows them to introduce new features quickly. And because it’s virtually impossible to do realistic load testing on this scale, the testing that they do perform is typically targeted at a subset of live users on the Web site who become unwitting guinea pigs for a new feature or tweak to the software, he explains.

“We made a lot of mistakes,” Benedetto says. “But in the end, I think we ended up doing more right than we did wrong.”

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