Inside MySpace.com

lizzyben writes "Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here." From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded 'Unexpected Error' screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."

Scalability

[eviloverlordx]

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

I agree. Keeping up with all of the pedophiles is something that most businesses rarely have to deal with.

Everyone signs up because..

[necro2607]

... they click on the pictures of the hot girls, only to get a "You must be logged in to do that!" message.

And we know why they're there.

[Kadin2048]

As far as personal profiles go, I'd suspect most people are pretty young, like 20s. But I know of many people in their 30s with MySpace sites also.

So, in other words, MySpace's chief demographics are "20-somethings" and "people trying to sleep with 20-somethings."

Re:Blah...

[owlnation]

I was personally surprised to see no mention of where they keep the ponies and glitter. I was sure that was how they ran of their technology. Must be a industrial secret...

Well...

[remmelt]

His keyboard repeat rate probably couldn't keep up with the exponential browser pop ups.

Retrieving comment...

[awing0]

Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.

This error has been forwarded to Slashdot's technical group.

amazed.

[mulcher]

I am amazed it runs on Windows and does as well as it does.

Re:Membership Milestones?

[Viper Daimao]

No, they went from 150 million down to 26 million. You obviously forgot this story [slashdot.org].

Re:I Would Have Signed Up...

[Wandering Wombat]

I checked out some profiles from the group of my local town... it brought Firefox to it's knees, and then did naughty, naughty things to it. True, they were mostly high school kids, I figure (not many people in my town are computer literate over the age of 20), but still... come on, people. Have some pride in your appearance.

MOD PARENT DOWN!!

[adamofgreyskull]

For the love of god! MOD PARENT DOWN!

Windows 2003 denial-of-service "feature"

[sych]

From TFA:

Last summer, MySpace's Windows 2003 servers shut down unexpectedly on multiple occasions. The culprit turned out to be a built-in feature of the operating system designed to prevent distributed denial of service attacks--a hacker tactic in which a Web site is subjected to so many connection requests from so many client computers that it crashes. MySpace is subject to those attacks just like many other top Web sites, but it defends against them at the network level rather than relying on this feature of Windows--which in this case was being triggered by hordes of legitimate connections from MySpace users.

"We were scratching our heads for about a month trying to figure out why our Windows 2003 servers kept shutting themselves off," Benedetto says. Finally, with help from Microsoft, his team figured out how to tell the server to "ignore distributed denial of service; this is friendly fire."

WHAT?!

So, Windows 2003 has a "feature" that deals with denial-of-service attacks - it shuts down! Brilliant!

Re:Everyone uses it

[Alex]

and you have a 4-digit slashdot ID??

Johnny come lately.

Alex

Re:And we know why they're there.

[lysergic.acid]

30s chicks are way, way hornier and sexually uninhibited than 20s chicks.

i could see how septuagenarians might be a little more sexually expressive than octogenarians, but thinking about either in that context really grosses me out.

Re:And we know why they're there.

[ottothecow]

Yeah, the great depression and the end of prohibition really led to those 30's chicks being WAY hornier.