In this interview taken by InfoQ’s Ryan Slobojan, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Because MySpace is built almost entirely on the .NET Framework, Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.
Watch: Dan Farino About MySpace’s Architecture (28 min.)
In the beginning of this interview, Dan speaks about general challenges encountered and the solutions used to make a very large web site run smoothly. He enters into details of dealing with performance bottlenecks, database or system failures, the need for debugging and logging applications. He mentions having problems with database bottlenecks which were addressed by implementing a custom cache.
Dan also talks about the .NET platform used to support the MySpace’s web site. He says that .NET has scaled well for them serving millions of users from hundreds of servers. One of the problems mentioned is the garbage collector which was intermittently introducing a significant delay in web site’s response time. Administering hundreds of servers is a difficult and time consuming task. Dan says they are using Microsoft’s PowerShell from the time when the technology was still in research, code name Monad, and he is very happy with it.
