"Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Ning recently shared their trials and tribulations at the QCon conference in San Francisco, California.

Dan Farino, chief systems architect at MySpace.com, said his site started with a very small architecture and scaled out. He focused on monitoring and administration on a Windows network and the challenge of keeping the system running on thousands of servers.

"Yes, we run Windows!" he said. "It's actually a pretty good server platform. IIS is a pretty good web server. Tuned properly, it's going to serve pages; it's not going to crash or tip over when it gets Slashdotted with two requests. It's pretty solid. What isn't solid about Windows is the large-scale management tools."

MySpace relies on 4,500-plus Windows-based web servers. A middle-tier cache has been added, but it's still "basically a bunch of servers from an operational perspective," Farino said."

Read more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/30/online_architectures/