PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
highscalability.com
highscalability.com
At one point Highscalability covered the reddit architecture, but he didn't actually talk to anyone at reddit about it, and got a lot of it wrong.
I tried to contact him and get it fixed, but he never responded to me.
So I have to wonder where these numbers are coming from.
I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!
NAO!
http://www.wordreference.com/pten/nao
Yes the a tilde diacritic is missing but its close enough. I also remember reading die in German sentences at the start and getting very confused in my brain for a while. Maybe its just me. :)
I would say there were about 15 people in the office at the time (1.5 years ago)
Markus is a slightly weird Rain Man kinda guy, but is obviously very smart. A bit smug, though likely deservedly.
He has a hot girlfriend, that is the head of marketing or something.
It was a three on one interview, which isn't very welcoming. No whiteboard, no code writing. Kinda glad I didn't get it, actually.
I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.
No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops.
and...
In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen.
I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun.
I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.
One note says "everything is dynamic, nothing is static" which sounds weird if they're using Akamai for anything but images. Images are claimed to be served at 100K HPS, which would be difficult for a handful of servers, especially with the dynamic content on top of it. It comes down to caching and hardware as usual.
Some interesting stuff. And it's on IIS which blew my mind.
webmasterworld.com/profilev4.cgi?action=view&member=markus007I think that says a lot more about you than about IIS. It's mature software, why wouldn't it perform on par with other mature webservers?
Slashdot, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc were the very large sites talking about what they used over the years and it was all about the open source stuff like Apache, PHP, etc.
Then I found out, on HN, that POF used IIS and it was mind blowing. You would think even Microsoft would promote its successful uses more like that. Until POF, I too had assumed IIS was only for 1,000 to 50,000 enterprisey setups. I didn't think it couldn't be used per se, but I just hadn't ever heard of it being used that way until POF either.
Can't find a direct link but I remember that little factoid because it surprised me.
I don't mean customer servers sold as services, this was before then, it's their own server network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Information_Services#U...
IIS 5.x was horrible which is what most people who have been around think about when we hear "IIS".
I can't find the blog post right now but currently there is a little Linux/Redis thrown in as well.
We use Linux for caching, load balancing, routing, monitoring, etc. The web tier and databases are Windows.
PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.
So poor usability actually is a feature.
Which comes back to the old argument about advertising-driven revenue models resulting in poor user experiences, since the "user" from a revenue model is the advertiser and YOU'RE the product.
Even with that factor though, I found PoF borderline unusable after a little experimentation and stopped using them in favour of OKC. I can't believe I'm the only one like that, or that there aren't some who simply dropped off PoF into nothing.
If that crappy site can extract value at such a high level, I'm sure a few reasonably small tweaks could extract significantly more.
At the scale pof operates at you have to A/B test everything because some things are very counter-intuitive.
My favorite anecdote of his (tried to find it on his blog but google is failing me) was when he briefly fixed the problem I hated most about the site: the aspect ratio of the profile pic thumbnails being off.
What happened is that it cost him lots of money. And the explanation as to why makes sense too: when the aspect ratio is messed up people can't tell at a glance what the person looks like so they click through to people's profiles a lot more instead of just scanning the top bar/search page. When your business model is based on page impressions getting people to load more pages means you get more money.
So in that case at least it's better for his pocket to have something that's obviously broken (and easy to fix) on the site.
Now, I could make the case that PoF has ridden the wave for long enough to build Markus enough money that if it all fails tomorrow he's still made for life and only really lost pride, but....
Wasn't that what I said?
Not bad.
If i remember correctly until a few years ago the site ran on a single webserver and db server!.
Edit: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish they used ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 2007.