How MySpace Generates Enough Load To Test Itself

An anonymous reader points out this article about "...how a big site like MySpace uses thousands of cloud computing cores to do performance testing on its live site. There are some really great numbers in there from the performance tests, like generating 16GB/second of bandwidth and 77,000 hits/second during testing (not including the live traffic on the site at the time)."

Re:Wait, what?

[ircmaxell]

The real news (to me at least) is that they use 77k hits per second to TEST. Normally, when I test at least, I try to go for at least 150% to 200% expected peak load. Assuming that they aren't doing this during peak hours, that puts their expected PEAK load somewhere around 100k hits per second or so... Large, yes. Large for that size of site? No way... Using RMS, I'd say that they are averaging around 25k to 35k hits per second IF they are testing for a 100k peak... That puts MYSPACE (once one of the largest sites on the internet at one time) around an Alexa rank of about 600 (based on a few other sites I know with that load level)... Since Alexa currently rates them at 14, that implies two possibilities. Either Alexa's rank information is demographically biased, or my figures are completely out of the blue... You decide...

Add revenue

[KevMar]

I wonder how much add revenue they generated from all those impressions?

does testing on production increase your page views?