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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#131

Post by danudey »

nikcub wrote: post #127
famousactress wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace. For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable... Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most…

> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale. Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades Most airline systems took decades to engineer

According to this link (after a few seconds of googling), Visa's network was down for 8 minutes in the five years ending 2001. Do you have citations for any of your claims?

Edit: Oops, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0916/038.html

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#132

Post by benologist »

gcr wrote: post #19
benologist wrote: post #3

No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…

Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown PHP-to-C compiler https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/ and Cassandra, their own custom database system http://cassandra.apache.org/ If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.

Back when MySpace actually mattered I don't think they had HipHop, Cassandra etc.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#133

Post by famousactress »

nikcub wrote: post #127
famousactress wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace. For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable... Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most…

> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale. Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades Most airline systems took decades to engineer

Really great points. Do they add features to those systems rapidly? Cause I think the original premise hinged on the combination of those two desires.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#134

Post by erikpukinskis »

enjo wrote: post #18
benologist wrote: post #3

No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…

I agree with the first part, but have to quibble with the statement "there were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level." I suppose that's true in absolute terms (nobody is at Facebooks level). However, there are definitely an army of really high traffic sites out there written in PHP, many of which predate Facebook. Problems of scale aren't exclusive to Facebook by any stretch. It seems to me that…

Wasn't Yahoo written largely in PHP?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#135

Post by [deleted] »

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

[deleted]

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#136

Post by tybris »

Stackoverflow doesn't seem to have many problems with it. Anyone who has done any C# programming knows .Net is * embarrassingly fast* these days. It'll save you a lot of "scaling" money.

What killed MySpace is poor management. It is one of those companies that still don't get that good engineers are as precious as good lawyers.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#137

Post by IgorPartola »

bradleyland wrote: post #33
dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

As they say, "A bad workman blames his tools." It's really hard to say that they failed because of Microsoft tools. The fact is that they made bad decisions in how they would implement and use their tools. There's nothing to prove they wouldn't have done the same dumb things with open source tools.

Precisely. How many terrible, awful, untouchable projects are out there that run on top of a LAMP stack? wordpress.com comes to mind with their thousands of servers dedicated to basically caching. I strongly believe that a terrible hacker will manage to foul up even the most beautiful language/framework, while a good hacker will be able to write neat and beautiful code in even the most obtuse and awkward languages.

As for their actual infrastructure: not having a version control system and a build system (e.g.: never deploying directly from the VCS) is a must for any size team and sometimes even for single developers. Thankfully, nowadays most people do use VCS's but build and deploy systems are largely at the level of glorified shell scripts at best.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#138

Post by [deleted] »

bradleyland wrote: post #33
dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

As they say, "A bad workman blames his tools." It's really hard to say that they failed because of Microsoft tools. The fact is that they made bad decisions in how they would implement and use their tools. There's nothing to prove they wouldn't have done the same dumb things with open source tools.

[deleted]

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#139

Post by nikcub »

famousactress wrote: post #133
nikcub wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale. Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades Most airline systems took decades to engineer

Really great points. Do they add features to those systems rapidly? Cause I think the original premise hinged on the combination of those two desires.

They don't have to add features quickly because they spend years designing and building them based on a spec that somebody else has spent years designing all so that when it launches, you can go online and book an airline ticket or make a transaction or whatever other essential daily activity and not have to think about what is taking place, let alone see an error screen or 404

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#140

Post by sajidnizami »

sofuture wrote: post #111
sajidnizami wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow's architecture these days is not just Microsoft stack. They are using Redis and whole load of other OSS tech to get things working. Here it is interesting to note that this is what they started with: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... and this is what they are currently using http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an... I find it sad that these days MS is…

It is difficult to get Cache frameworks and other infrastructure working with MS Stack if you got a high performance website. How so?

All these new frameworks are designed to work with OSS tech. So lets say some better NoSQL platform comes out, it supports OSS technologies first. .Net comes later and sometimes it is difficult to decide which client library to pick to connect to the NoSQL service. OSS client libraries would mature early and .Net libraries would take a little time.

Connecting OSS tech and MS stack is getting easier but still leaves you with a lot of uncertainty.

This is an example: http://wiki.basho.com/Client-Libraries.html These guys have Erlang client but there is no support for .Net.

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