Large ASP.NET websites - 1

Anything that represents customer hand-holding represents a failure of site design - Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist

What does it take to run a large ASP.NET website that can have 30+ million hits a day (500 - 600 pages per second)? You would have to ask Markus Frind who single handedly runs PlentyOfFish, a hugely popular on-line dating website. 

The stats & lessons (via High Scalability) about his site can be insightful to ASP.NET developers.

Tech Stats:
  • PlentyOfFish (POF) runs on ASP.NET, IIS, Akamai CDN, Foundry ServerIron Load Balancer
  • PlentyOfFish gets 1.2 billion page views/month, and 500,000 average unique logins per day. 
  • 2 load balanced web servers with 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of RAM (using about 800 MBs), 2 hard drives, runs Windows x64 Server 2003.
  • 3 DB servers. No data on their configuration.
  • Approaching 64,000 simultaneous connections and 2 million page views per hour.
  • Internet connection is a 1Gbps line of which 200Mbps is used.
  • 1 TB/day serving 171 million images through Akamai.
  • 6TB storage array to handle millions of full sized images being uploaded every month to the site.

Lessons:
  • Creating simple things is the result of years of practical experience.
  • There isn't a single site in the top 100 that doesn’t use a CDN. 
  • "The bigger you get as a free site the less money you make per visit and the more it costs to service a visit."
  • You can't always listen to user responses. Some users will always love new features and others will hate it. Only a fraction will complain. Instead, look at what features people are actually using by watching your site.
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