In my last couple of blog entries I have been bashing MySpace, ranting on about how cluttered and unusable the site is, however MySpace is currently the worlds 5th post popular website, and I can therefore not argue against its technical success keeping up with growth.

Doing a little research into the technical workings behind MySpace I came across a very interesting article in which it discusses how MySpace has had to re-engineer its website software, databases and storage systems to keep up with the huge demands being placed on its computer infrastructure.

MySpace was founded by Tom Anderson in 2003, a year later, in 2004, MySpace had near ½ million accounts which was already proving to test the limits of the single SQL 2003 database server.

The database was split into a master and slave setup, which lasted MySpace through to almost 2 million accounts, although by this point the huge amount of traffic was causing I/O problems, as users read/write to the 2 database servers. Staff re-engineered the MySpace databases once again, they switched the database data over to to a SAN (Storage Area Network) farming out different functions (login, profiles, blog etc.) to different database servers.

Going through various database re-jiggs supporting MySpace up to 9 million accounts, MySpace moved from the previous website software programming system called Cold Fusion to Microsoft’s ASP.NET, this made greater use of server processor power and worked more efficiently.

At 17 million accounts the Myspace staff started investigating database caching servers, put in place to handle frequently occurring queries. In mid 2005 at 26 million accounts MySpace upgraded their database software to SQL Server 2005, although at the time still in Beta, MySpace desperately needed to take advantage of their servers 64-bit processors.

The story continues as the site grew further, today MySpace boasts over 106 million accounts, a number which many corporate websites today never have to bear.

It is very impressive that behind the scenes at MySpace there seems to be a great deal of activity as the servers and databases are being re-engineered to keep up with growth. Although I can not praise MySpace as a teenager would, just this once, I will take my hat off to the way in which MySpace technically kept up with its astonishing growth.

“Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor.” –The Listeners, Walter De la Mare. 1873