[dhosek]

My wife worked there for the transition. Her very first .net page was the MySpace homepage (which was demoed by Steve Ballmer at CES, iirc). Microsoft was very unhappy with the decision to retain the .cf extension on web pages even after the transition to .net. There were some crazy levels of scaling happening behind the scenes—they had database requirements beyond the capabilities of sql server and there was code on the server side to route to different sql clusters based on the user's numeric id. They also had more page views than they could sell ads for. There was actually a pretty crazed level of new feature development happening at the same time—any time that friendster or some other site would release a new feature, Tom would insist that it be implemented on MySpace right away. At the same time, he was also requiring things like pixel-for-pixel identical output for existing pages/features through all of this.

[411111111111111]

> to route to different sql clusters

That's called sharding and is pretty widely used nowadays. There is even readily available middleware that handles this for you, so no need to put it into the backend.

[yellowapple]

Keep in mind this is more than a decade ago. Sharding was almost certainly state-of-the-art and exotic back then (hell, it's arguably pretty unusual in the wild even today, even if a lot more mature of a concept).

[411111111111111]

Oh, of course! I did not wish to come of as arrogant. I just wanted to add the term (for easier googling if someone is interested) and a note that it's no longer necessary to modify your api to use that strategy.

[dhosek]

IIRC, this was actually a step beyond the sharding that MS SQL supported. They were really the first people to do big data.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> At the same time, he was also requiring things like pixel-for-pixel identical output for existing pages/features through all of this.

Break middle-school students' copypasta CSS rules for animated GIF backgrounds at your peril.