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How MySpace Generates Enough Load To Test Itself
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)."
/. people should know better, especially anonymous readers
It's the area you allow between yourself and fellow hominids, and varies from location to location. In Japan, "My Space" is sparse, in rural America it's pretty large (but so are the hominids). It also varies from hominid to hominid; you need a lot of My Space for the fat stinky guy, as little as possible for the hot chick. More info here ;)
Free Martian Whores!
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."
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.
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..
MySpace is wise to do this kind of testing and load balancing. You never know when a twelfth person might attempt to connect to the site, throwing their carefully laid plans into total chaos.
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.
I wonder how much add revenue they generated from all those impressions?
does testing on production increase your page views?
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
That's why they have to simulate a bunch of fake people using myspace to do load testing.
To be fair, they're more intelligent than the real people using myspace.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The article was written by an employee of the company that sold their testing software/services to MySpace. Of course they're going to have glowing reviews about their testing tools. With that said the author is right. Capacity testing in production is needed for high availability sites. Verifying your real time monitoring tools is also important.
I'm pretty sure this test was just for nostalgic purposes:
MySpace Admin #1: Remember when we used to have millions of hits per hour?
MySpace Admin #2: Yeah... those were the days. I was, like, a rockstar to my friends.
MySpace Admin #1: Yeah, my friends thought I had the coolest job in the world, working for MySpace.
MySpace Admin #1 and #2: *sigh*
MySpace Admin #2:...hey - I know! We could pay some company to run a load test, it'll be just like the good ol' days!
MySpace Admin #1: Yeah!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
MySpace Engineer: Which brings us to the issue of load testing.
MySpace Exec: So do it.
MySpace Engineer: Well, we can't.
MySpace Exec: Am I missing something here? You just got done showing how stupid our users are. So just simulate them.
MySpace Engineer: Look, sir, with all due respect, we can put lol-bots up to post crap it's just that we have no way of mimicking that amount of garbage.
MySpace Exec: Well how much is it?
MySpace Engineer: Let me remind you, our previous slides showed you the magic of the MySpace machine--millions of users putting garbage in with the result being unadulterated horse shit flying out of the site. But to load test we need a lot of garbage. Several billion metric tonnes of garbage. Otherwise we just wouldn't produce the same amount of browser destroying horse shit we produce at peak loads.
MySpace Exec: Have you spoken with the City of New York?
MySpace Engineer: Sir, twenty five New York Cities wouldn't produce the amount of garbage we need.
MySpace Exec: Holy shit.
MySpace Engineer: Yes, this indeed requires a shitstack of biblical proportions.
MySpace Exec: What're we gonna do?
MySpace Engineer: Well, to solve this problem we turned to the motherload of bullshit. The one thing that everyone keeps endlessly spewing garbage about.
MySpace Exec: The Cloud!
MySpace Engineer: Bingo.
My work here is dung.
Anyone know?
It's what Facebook was called in 2006.
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