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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#141

Post by nikcub »

danudey wrote: post #131
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

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

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed.

Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and all of twitter, etc.) since they construct those whack trading apps that suck everything up and analyze it for signals. If there are any quants on here they could tell you about this more.

The airline system I was referring to is SABRE. Early IBM was built on their rollouts and we are talking about the 50s. V interesting story, lots of references from this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#History

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#142

Post by antihero »

No, Myspace failed because it was a shithole filled with awful people that nobody took seriously, and Facebook turned out to be relatively clean and useful.

Don't blame technology for your failings. Facebook won because it had a first name and second name field.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#143

Post by IgorPartola »

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

True, but different networks have different constraints and require different solutions. Data warehousing, which is likely what most of GS's data is doing, is very different than trying to scaling a near-real time data access system.

Payment processing only deals with one type of data: money. This gives you as many shortcuts as the number of constraints it imposes.

Airline control and departure systems are probably as close to a typical modern web app as you'd get from your list.

My point is that while there certainly are engineers that have worked with high scalability issues without ever touching the web, they have also likely been solving slightly different problems.

P.S.: Other systems that require high availability but are not the web: telephony and cell communications, broadcasting and doomsday devices.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#144

Post by nikcub »

sajidnizami wrote: post #107
rbanffy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stackoverflow has a tiny fraction of the traffic MySpace had when it was relevant. I bet it has a fraction of its traffic now.

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…

tbh if you are running .NET and SQL Server you don't really need a cache like redis or memcache since SQL Server has had an in-memory query cache built in for 12+ years now.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#145

Post by fleitz »

MySpace didn't die because of the Microsoft stack, they died because their users left for Facebook. I'd take the .NET stack over PHP any day of the week. I certainly don't know of any company that was so screwed by the performance of C# that they needed to create a C++ compiler for it. (HipHop compiler for PHP) PHP programmers aren't exactly known for their brilliance.

Definitely not a problem to fix their deploy problems on the .NET stack, I've put together automated deploys for Windows and with MSI they are a breeze. Yes, it's going to take a week or two to get the hang of WIX but after that the installer does all your dependency checks and you have a very repeatable process. If you stamp your MSIs with the build number it's even very easy to rollback.

This is just about the most monumentally stupid thing you can say, if you really don't like C# there are a dozen other languages available (like Ruby AND Python). If you're hiring people that can ONLY write code in one language then that should be a sign that you're not hiring the right people to begin with. They hired crap talent that happened to know C#

All this which stack scales best crap is cargo cult programming, you should recognize it as such. Most startups die because they have no customers, not because their servers are on fire from load.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#146

Post by nikcub »

sajidnizami wrote: post #32
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…

I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. They write code to satisfy the requirement and are quite good at it, but it ends there. Remember when people used ASP.Net web forms and it was hard to get rid of viewstate in the rendered page, and only the people who knew internals of platform well could…

You must be getting the shit end of candidates because I know as many brilliant C# developers as I do C, , PHP, Python etc. I also know plenty of terrible Ruby, Python etc. developers. You can not generalize based on the tool a developer uses based on you interviewing a handful of people

oh and that viewstate forms thing from SEO is the SEO talking bullshit and trying to justify his job

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#147

Post by nikcub »

benologist wrote: post #132
gcr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HipHop went live on FB last year. It didn't even go live everywhere at once.

For some reason ppl think Mark created it on the 3rd day

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#148

Post by famousactress »

nikcub wrote: post #139
famousactress wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gotcha. Sounds like an environment not likely to breed folks who are constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#149

Post by sajidnizami »

nikcub wrote: post #144
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…

tbh if you are running .NET and SQL Server you don't really need a cache like redis or memcache since SQL Server has had an in-memory query cache built in for 12+ years now.

Thinking that would help is a mistake. Take it from someone who went to optimize SQL Server 2008 R2 to its limits.

Cache framework's are absolutely necessary. The whole idea is to avoid a SQL Server hit and return a cached data object in memory. I think Stackoverflow is the best case study here.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#150

Post by nikcub »

nikcub wrote: post #139
famousactress wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

no what I am saying is that it is unusual for them to get themselves in a situation where they have to suddenly code out of a hole at 'startup pace' (whatever that means)

startups don't have a monopoly on working hard or working fast, and it is arrogant to generalize about both .NET and enterprise developers in that way since we are all in one way or anther standing on the shoulders of earlier enterprise work (where do you think what we call 'nosql' and think is new and grovvy, was first used?)

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