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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#151
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…

not just Microsoft stack

The Microsoft stack is not always just a Microsoft stack any more. e.g. it has jQuery out of the box. Of course you mix and match when you get to the high end. The idea of the MS-only shop is not as true as it used to be, many people are more pragmatic.

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind

Why, because MS didn't supply every single piece of server infrastructure software that So use, just the main ones? That's an odd definition of "lagging".

MS have a distributed cache called "Windows Server AppFabric" (formerly "velocity"). I don't know that much about it.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#152
post #127

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

> Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web

Why would you believe that Goldman Sachs stores more data than can be reached by HTTP?! Only YouTube amounts to petabytes of data. http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-...

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not so much that certain programmers don't think that page load speed matters; it's that the culture around the platform doesn't encourage speed. You're conditioned to not care anymore, because ASP.NET Web Forms makes it so damn hard to achieve responsive web apps, and building responsive web apps almost universally means breaking away from the standard ASP.NET Web Forms style of development. You have to abandon…

If your knowledge of ASP stops at webforms, then you have nothing to say about anything recent in ASP. It's all gone MVC and jQuery. StackOverflow is a good example.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#154
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.

Could anything "off-the-shelf" have managed that load?

It depends on how many servers you are willing to run. When you have 500 million users, and a decent amount of them, accesses your site multiple times a day, CPU cycles per request starts to count.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#155
post #30

I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook.…

"Fox was a closed source company" Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?

You are kidding me right? There are loads of Microsoft shops, who see open source as evil, and have severe problems in using anything that is not Microsoft. Scary, I know.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#156

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…

not just Microsoft stack The Microsoft stack is not always just a Microsoft stack any more. e.g. it has jQuery out of the box. Of course you mix and match when you get to the high end. The idea of the MS-only shop is not as true as it used to be, many people are more pragmatic. I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind Why, because MS didn't supply every single piece of server infrastructure software that So…

I remember Velocity and articles on it initially. Thanks for the help. I am looking up AppFabric now.

See I prefer sticking with one flavor of tools because its easier for developers to adjust. TBH MS does supply almost everything from grounds up. I only had to look elsewhere for advanced distributed caching frameworks. In fact before switching to Amazon EC2 our old datacenter was running MS VMM and our stack still didn't have anything other than MS software.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#157
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are right about candidates.

I had the same reaction to SEO at first. See SEO guy is partially right. It involved page load times. Larger viewstate means longer load time and that gets penalized by Google.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#158
post #150
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally fair. First, apologies if it sounded like I was suggesting startups have a monopoly on working hard and fast. Of course I never meant anything like that at all.

Second, arrogant really isn't fair because I certainly never gave an assessment of my own abilities or value.

Third, totally.. .NET stands on the shoulders of the same stuff the infrastructure that runs most of the internet stands on. It's just that .NET doesn't run most (or even lots and lots of) the internet.. so to suggest that the .NET development community is less likely on average to be ready to build Facebook doesn't seem like blasphemy.

That's very different from suggesting the .NET camp isn't full of awesome, hard-working developers... but really, I apologize if it comes off that way. Definitely don't mean to suggest it in the least.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#159
post #150
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ahh sorry, I misread your tone - might be because I have been up for so long (working at startup pace ;))

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#160
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. Considering what can be done with careful tuning of hardware and database structure, I can tell SQL Server's limits are very high, but nowhere near close to whatever MySpace needed.

SQL Server is the third best Microsoft product. Right after their natural keyboard and their mice lineup.

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