Friendster wrapup: does MySQL scale
July 14th, 2004Here is a wrap up of some links and information from the friendster PHP conversion of a couple weeks ago.
First, it appears performance really was a major problem for friendster. Friendster Quickly Gathering Foes:
The key issues behind the Friendster abandonment trend, according to users, are the service’s inability to do anything about its habitual server lag problems, and its growing reputation for heavy-handed moral policies and unilateral decisions it makes on behalf of its members.
Performance problems show up in this usuability study of Friendster. more discussion of friendster performance. This quote from Cracking the code to Romance seems to show they are aware of the issue.
Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, “We have a policy that we are not being hacked.” When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, “Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster.”
While the consensus seems to be that you can write scalable applications in either Java or PHP, MySQL is another major part of Friendster’s architecture. Why Friendster is so slow makes an educated guess on the cause of Friendsters performance problems, laying the blame on an inappropriate use of MySQL. I wonder how much of this is educated and how much of this is guess.
Philip Greenspun suggests that Friendster “flush MySQL and replace with Oracle 10g.”
It would seem that the friendster folks have a mysql support contract and Attend MySQL conferences:
between sessions, three young men from Friendster are chatting with a neat-looking person in a MySQL shirt, who introduces them to another neat-looking person in a MySQL shirt and says, “he’ll be your primary support contact.”
If the natural architecture of PHP is to push scalability issues out of the language and into the database, the Friendster case seems to raise the question, does MySQL scale?
I would like to see more official information out of Friendster regarding this case.
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July 17th, 2004 at 3:08 pm
Greenspun’s student-driven analysis certainly aims to be informative, but I think only Friendster’s engineers can shed some light on the assumptions that people have been making, both about the PHP/JSP debate, and their particular opinions on MySQL scaling. My guess is that Jeremy Zawodny knows a bit about MySQL scaling, and would probably argue against Greenspun’s Oracle comment. Something like this, maybe: I can use a Zamboni to plow my driveway of snow, but there are other things less expensive and probably better suited for it.
It’s something like traffic design: everyone who sits in a traffic jam thinks that they are smarter than the civil engineers who designed the traffic flow and light timings. Everyone is an expert.
I think that while the question of whether or not MySQL is scalable is best answered by people who use it in production, with high load, in many different ways. The levele of opinion needs to come down in these topics, and the level of fact and proof needs to come up.