MySpace is one of the most fascinating web success stories, we have heard in the past few years. From personal home pages to social networking; the journey has been amazing so far. MySpace was founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003 and was eventually sold to News Corporation for $580 million in 2005. Since then, it has become one of the top five most visited sites in the US and still continues to draw millions of new visitors each month (Source: http://www.alexa.com). In the most volatile world of Web where each new venture is prone to failure at any point of time, the continuing success of MySpace generates an obvious curiosity.

It is beyond the imagination to succeed for a product without using an efficient technology. It is not easy to handle the 15 billion page views per month while each page view may require responding several user queries as well as uploading and updating the page simultaneously.

Still, MySpace is known for delivering quality services to its users. Without engaging too much into the technical complexities, let’s try to find out how MySpace works to facilitate its services.

A typical MySpace setup uses the following technologies to respond user’s query:

1. When a user types the domain name www.myspace.com into a web browser, he is actually requesting for an IP address from the DNS server. Most of the sites do have their own single DNS server but myspace.com does not. MySpace uses a managed DNS Server that handles user IP request via a huge network of servers. This method helps in cutting down the congestion in the peak access times to avoid the slowing down of server.
2. At the next step, proxy servers serve as the intermediary between user’s computer and the main server. A proxy server is used to deliver a cached content to the user to limit redundant queries that results in less congestion.
3. For emailing, instant messaging and blogging eMySpac uses Blue Dragon.Net software running Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) code on Microsoft IIS server.
4. The database stores uploaded users’ files such as images, videos and songs among other things. The database runs on 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon processors and contains 10 server nodes storing a data of 1.92 terabyte each.
5. A server switch operates back end to facilitate the communication between multiple servers running on multiple platforms.

In this way, MySpace technical team has poured a lot of efforts into minimizing the congestion and maximizing the performance of the system.

Great job MySpace!

Reference: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/myspace1.htm