Since its launch in 2003, the social networking site MySpace has become a cultural phenomenon. The site is a premier destination for everyone from small groups of friends getting together for a virtual chit-chat, to serious filmmakers and musicians who use the site to forge closer connections with their fans.

The numbers are astonishing: MySpace has the second-highest traffic of all sites on the Web, with an estimated 38 million unique visits per month. More than 65 million registered members use the site to connect with friends, listen to music, share pictures and video, and write in their blogs—and 260,000 more users sign up every day. Photo sharing is the site’s most popular feature, and MySpace currently hosts about 430 million user images. Music is a close second, with musicians adding thousands of MP3s to the site and millions of songs being streamed out to users every day.

Microsoft’s platform, applications, and development environment have been the foundation of MySpace’s infrastructure since day one, and to keep up with the site’s explosive growth, MySpace relies on a range of Microsoft® technologies to meet critical performance and reliability criteria, provide rich new features, and keep costs down.

When the site’s membership swelled to 9 million, MySpace converted parts of the site to an ASP.NET back end, realizing immediate performance improvements and lower overall CPU usage. As the site grew to 17 million users, MySpace greatly expanded its use of ASP.NET, deploying a large-scale dynamic caching engine that helps ensure that every member’s home profile page—the centerpiece of the MySpace experience—is always available and quick to load. The company also moved to the 64-bit edition of Windows Server®, enabling it to load up servers with more RAM and reduce the number of machines required to run the site.

MySpace recently rolled out entirely new code built with ASP.NET 2.0 to support the capabilities of its home profile pages, and the performance results have been amazing: CPU usage has dropped from 85 percent to 27 percent across these pages, enabling the company to serve more users while reducing by nearly 40 percent the number of servers required to deliver the page volume. Additionally, the object-oriented programming model of Microsoft Visual C#® has given the MySpace ASP.NET 2.0 development team more flexibility to design new features and implement them on a large scale.

MySpace runs in a scalable, federated environment using SQL Server™ 2005, Microsoft .NET 2.0, and Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 64-bit editions. Spread across three data centers, MySpace relies on more than 4,000 servers and a storage area network comprising more than 3,000 disks.

Part of MySpace’s broad appeal is the rich customization it offers. Members can quickly create profiles that are as unique as they are, and they can upload music, photos, and video to share with friends using easy-to-use, automated tools.

While simple customizations are available to all users, some users want to take more control over their page. To provide this control, MySpace developers are building on the ASP.NET “Atlas” client development platform to make it even easier to design rich, highly customized user profiles. For example, users will soon be able to drag and drop components such as music players or lists of friends in the browser, giving them even more flexibility in how their profile appears. It will be as simple to use as it was to develop—it took a team of two developers only two evenings of work to convert these profiling tools to the Atlas framework.

MySpace is also working on weaving the site’s social networking experience into the forthcoming Windows Vista™ operating system. Its developers are creating a “Slides Gadget” that will enable users to display an ongoing slideshow of MySpace images on their desktop, giving them a constant connection to their friends and a direct entry point to many of the site’s most compelling features.

“The Microsoft platform, and especially the Atlas framework and the capabilities of Windows Vista, are helping us create innovative new features that empower our members’ creativity and give MySpace a ‘stickiness’ that Web sites alone can’t match,” says MySpace Chief Technology Officer Aber Whitcomb.

Through constant innovation—and a strong foundation built on Microsoft technologies—MySpace has been able to grow from zero to 65 million users in less than three years. By continuing to deliver compelling new features and adopting leading-edge technology, it is ensuring that this impressive growth streak won’t end any time soon.

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