Presentation: Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com

Posted by Abel Avram on Feb 10, 2009

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Enterprise Architecture,

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Performance & Scalability ,

Architecture ,

Enterprise Architecture ,

.NET ,

Configuration Management ,

.NET Framework

Tags

MySpace ,

PowerShell ,

IIS

In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talked about administering thousands of web servers from a system’s architect viewpoint. He mostly detailed the performance counter monitoring used by MySpace, the system profiler and the system administration site demoing the tools for the audience to see how it works.

Watch: Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com (49 min.)

Dan started his presentation with a short historical look at site’s evolution. MySpace initially had ColdFusion pages delivered by IIS 5.0 running on Win2k machines. Now, the site has about 3,000 IIS 6.0 servers with ASP.NET 2.0 with some WCF and WWF on .NET 3.5.

After that, Dan showed how the performance counter monitor works by watching all servers and reporting in real time if there is one of them that needs more investigation and possibly action taken to ensure proper functionality of the machine.

Next was the profiler which takes one request every 10 seconds and traces all its related activity in order to determine if there are potential problems developing on the respective machine.

The last tool presented was the system administration site. Initially they used VB scripts and batch files which did not scale well. Now they are using PowerShell which offers the scalability necessary to administer thousands of servers.

Dan answered questions during the last third of the session.

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   Slides garbled

   by Bela Ban

   The slides are unreadable, I tried both Firefox and Safari, can you correct this ?

   Reply

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   Re: Slides garbled

   by Diana Plesa

   The issue has been fixed.
   Diana

   Reply

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   Sound level is very low

   by Ovidiu EFTIMIE

   The sound level is very low

   Reply

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   Re: Sound level is very low

   by Floyd Marinescu

   There is a second volume control in the flash video window itself, make sure it is at 100%? The video is quite loud and normal for me.

   Reply

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   Re: Sound level is very low

   by Jim Nasium

   I have the sound level on the flash player turn all the way up and it is REALLY loud for me. hth

   Reply

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