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How MySpace Generates Enough Load To Test Itself

Posted by timothy on from the advertises-free-riding-lessons-and-crack dept.

An anonymous reader points out this article about "...how a big site like MySpace uses thousands of cloud computing cores to do performance testing on its live site. There are some really great numbers in there from the performance tests, like generating 16GB/second of bandwidth and 77,000 hits/second during testing (not including the live traffic on the site at the time)."

6 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wait, what? by DIplomatic · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not sure where you're getting 77k hits per second. FTFA: "The goal was to test an additional 1 million concurrent users on their live site stressing the new video features. The key word here is ‘concurrent’. Not over the course of an hour or day 1 million users concurrently active on the site."

  2. They did it by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Informative

    by outsourcing to This Company. In additon, This Company used Stuff to do Things. After initial tests, This Company did Other Things. This Company is a leader in stuff, especially utilizing their software This Stuff. Try This Stuff Today!

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  3. 16 Gigabits/Second by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 2, Informative

    I thought that 16GB/sec seemed a little high so I checked the article. The actual network load they generated is 16 gigabits per second using 800 instances of Amazon's EC2.

    --
    I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
    1. Re:16 Gigabits/Second by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I'm sorry.. WHAT!?

      16Gbit/second isn't much. It's hardly more than we handled at my previous company. A relatively small national hosting company in northern europe.

      Not for testing, mind you, but 16Gbit/sec is not a lot of bandwidth. You can easily handle it with say, ~50 boxes. Considering the million of requests myspace, not even amazon, gets per second, plus all the computation they have to do in the background, it hardly seems like a .. big deal.

      We're talking about 800 machines, with 3.2Kcores or so. 800 machines, each with a 100Mbit interface could easily generate 80Gbit of traffic. This test seems rather small-scale to me.

      Meh.

  4. Re:Wait, what? by Volante3192 · · Score: 3, Informative

    They were adding 77k hits/sec to their live traffic, not testing against 77k hits/sec.

    I.e., if 4 mil live users were hitting MySpace during the test, MySpace's servers were actually feeling the impact of 5 mil.

  5. Re:Wait, what? by Monsieur_F · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some artists still use it to announce their next concerts

    --
    McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.