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MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

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Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#31
post #9
post #6

It's not completely impossible to do good work on the .Net platform. But it is very, very unlikely. .Net teaches programmers to write code to .Net, to Microsoft rules. It teaches its victims to use the excreable "viewstate" and POST when they mean to GET and pass volumes of unnecessary and poorly-encoded data back and forth between the server and client. .Net programmers learn to drag and drop things onto forms which…

Perhaps you are being a bit too strong here. I might hold an uncommon contrarian view for news.yc but, here goes nothing: "It teaches its victims to use the excreable "viewstate" and POST when they mean to GET and pass volumes of unnecessary and poorly-encoded data back and forth between the server and client." You are right here to the extent that "viewstate" is the default way of managing state, scalably, in ASP.NE…

"If you are really hard-core about performance, you can write HTTP handlers that override parts or whole of the default handlers. Thus, you can maintain state on the server side completely if you wish to (dealing also with the concomitant issues to scale the site)"

Why should a programmer have to write special handlers just to save session state on the server side? Other platforms (Java, PHP, etc.) does that stuff for you in the background.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#32
post #19

All spoken here do not understand .Net enough. I worked for tagworld.com and this web project is "quite" big. Viewstate and drag'n'drops and the like are nowhere used. .Net is NOT for web sites, it is for web projects, really big and heterogeneous, with lots of services behind. For other please use php and the like, with "quick submit to db" approach.

Could you elaborate on what makes the tagworld.com project so "big"? Edit: Also, I find it interesting that on a site so big (I mean MySpace, and thusly, on a site that should have a fair number of smart developers working on it), they have not changed the default IIS error message for something a little more site-specific and user friendly. To see what I mean, click the story's URL. :) Or is doing something like tha…

they didn't change it for the same reason that they didn't do nice design, IMO.

tagworld.com is really complex thing despite its simplicity from the outside. It has unique user base and handles around 1000 requests per minute. It uses around 20 web servers and 20 other servers for db, file storage, video/photo converting.

All code is written from scratch and .Net is great in maintaining the developement process. C# compiles and most errors get caught before deployment. In addition there is a buit in mechanism for validating dynamic pages, which also helps a lot. For some time we used to deploy the whole thing daily, with active users on the site.

.Net is more for the corporate world with lots of legacy code and outside apps. It just can't be done almost with any language except java.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#33

All spoken here do not understand .Net enough. I worked for tagworld.com and this web project is "quite" big. Viewstate and drag'n'drops and the like are nowhere used. .Net is NOT for web sites, it is for web projects, really big and heterogeneous, with lots of services behind. For other please use php and the like, with "quick submit to db" approach.

Simple little websites like Facebook and Wikipedia seem to get by quite nicely with the quick and dirty PHP approach :-)

They are really simple. Try comparing them to some enterprise solution if you had a chance to work on one.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#35

People who spoke against .Net/C#. Please study it really deep first. Do not make fun of youself.

+1 for that. Even though I am trying to stay away from Microsoft platforms these days, I still will say that cirics of .NET/C# who posted above do not even deserve a serious answer. One "word" - RTFM.

And nobody so far has mentioned one of the best features of ASP.NET apps: crazy speed. After everything gets precompiled it is amazing how much load a cheapo $1K server can handle.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#36
post #35

People who spoke against .Net/C#. Please study it really deep first. Do not make fun of youself.

+1 for that. Even though I am trying to stay away from Microsoft platforms these days, I still will say that cirics of .NET/C# who posted above do not even deserve a serious answer. One "word" - RTFM. And nobody so far has mentioned one of the best features of ASP.NET apps: crazy speed. After everything gets precompiled it is amazing how much load a cheapo $1K server can handle.

[deleted]

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#37

All spoken here do not understand .Net enough. I worked for tagworld.com and this web project is "quite" big. Viewstate and drag'n'drops and the like are nowhere used. .Net is NOT for web sites, it is for web projects, really big and heterogeneous, with lots of services behind. For other please use php and the like, with "quick submit to db" approach.

Simple little websites like Facebook and Wikipedia seem to get by quite nicely with the quick and dirty PHP approach :-)

its not exactly quick and dirty...its rapid development, which means they eventually can get something very complex (which I'm sure facebook has in place), but if they need to start over, they can do so quickly.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#38
post #35

People who spoke against .Net/C#. Please study it really deep first. Do not make fun of youself.

+1 for that. Even though I am trying to stay away from Microsoft platforms these days, I still will say that cirics of .NET/C# who posted above do not even deserve a serious answer. One "word" - RTFM. And nobody so far has mentioned one of the best features of ASP.NET apps: crazy speed. After everything gets precompiled it is amazing how much load a cheapo $1K server can handle.

Bingo.

Check out my comments below.

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#39
post #16
post #7

Myspace runs? Really? More like limps along..

Seriously? It's funny how hating myspace has become as popular as hating microsoft... I'd like to see you make something "run" with that many users.

Seriously, the site had more downtime, more errors, and was slower than any site I have ever seen. I'm betting that you missed that though.

The founders pored so much money into just barely keeping their non-scalable site running that they completely watered down their share of the company. Is that what you call succeeding?

Re: MySpace runs on IIS? Really?

#40
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users does MySpace "run" with, again?

According to this ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/media_nm/myspace_dc_2 ) MySpace is at about 61 million active, unique users while Facebook is at about 19 million. Also MySpace users spend more time on the site than Facebook uses, which I'm sure translates to more traffic per user. As a very unscientific test, I just logged on to my Facebook account and my Myspace account and noted the following about my home…

You're about two years too late to do benchmarks on myspace as a startup. They've re-written the thing at least twice over and put a whole lot more money into fixing it up by now.

Myspace's server software and html was bad. So so bad.

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