Windows Hotmail Factoids
December 24, 2009
Navigate to “A Peek behind the Scenes at Hotmail.” You can learn quite a bit about how Microsoft supports 350 million mail users. For me the most interesting comment in the write up was:
For every developer on our staff we have a test engineer who works hand in hand with him or her to give input on the design and specs, set up a test infrastructure, write and automate test cases for new features, and measure quality.
I like redundancy, but I wonder about the cost of this approach.
Other factoids are:
- over 1.3 billion inboxes (some users have multiple inboxes)
- over 3 billion messages a day and filter out over 1 billion spam messages
- storage grows at over 2 petabytes a month
- over 155 petabytes of storage deployed (70% of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos)
- the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world. (I thought MySpace.com was, but I guess that info was flawed.)
Hotmail used to run on Unix or Linux. Interesting stuff.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 24, 2009
Oyez, oyez. I wish to report to the US Postal Service that this write up was a freebie. Email may be one of the reasons that the USPS is struggling with cost control. Oh, the magazine and direct mail sectors are not exactly thriving either.
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