Why is MySpace so buggy and error-prone?

[elmwood]

Seriously, there’s no other Web site that’s as buggy as MySpace. When I’m browsing through profiles, or doing anything else on the site, I’ll get an error message for one out of every four or five pages. Many times, I’ll be redirected to the main page instead of the function or page a link was intended to go to.

MySpace is so buggy, I almost think it’s deliberate; to make users believe it’s really a small-time operation instead of the public face of a corporate juggernaut. Does anyone know the Straight Dope behind the bugs?

[neutron_star]

Too much success, too fast:

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

One problem is that MySpace is pushing Microsoft’s Web technologies into territory that only Microsoft itself has begun to explore, Benedetto says. As of November, MySpace was exceeding the number of simultaneous connections supported by SQL Server, causing the software to crash.

MySpace developers have repeatedly redesigned the Web site’s software, database and storage systems to try to keep pace with exploding growth, but the job is never done. “It’s kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, where every time you finish, it’s time to start over again,” says Jim Benedetto, MySpace’s vice president of technology.

[sdguy]

In additon to the above mentioned.

I just recently took a comptuer class for HTML and they used myspace as an example. Myspace lets users use their own HTML code, and much of it is horribly written. Further formats such as flash and linking aren’t done right. You may note if you are on dial up myspace is pretty hard to use if not impossible.

Kids constantly post programs on it like “Click here and see who’s been looking at your myspace page,” often times which contain keylogger and other spyware.

It was interesting to contrast myspace to 360.yahoo.com.

306.yahoo lets you turn off the graphics and it works well

[ZipperJJ]

Flash, HTML and linked graphics aren’t going to screw up MySpace’s service, though. Those things are rendered client-side and the “weight” of them goes from the third party host’s service to your browser. All MySpace has to do in the case of Flash and graphics is to spit out the markup text to your browser and your browser does the rest of the work. I could type 200 characters of text in my profile or put an embedded flash movie that consists of 200 characters of HTML that embeds a Flash movie and it makes no difference to MySpace - but it does make a difference in browser loading time.

Flash only makes a difference to the MySpace server when it involves the embedded music on a MySpace Music account page or the embedded songs you can put on your profile that come from MySpace servers.

Neutron star’s post was right on the money. It is very hard to “patch up” a system such as MySpace that was probably not built for this kind of traffic in the first place. It takes many coders and many servers to get that sort of system right - like Google has managed to do - and even though they were bought out they just haven’t had the time/money yet to get it done.