Jay Paroline

Grooveshark surpassed the 500,000 registered user mark today.
Ignoring the fact that many of our users never bother to register (it’s not necessary in order to use the site), 500k is an absolutely phenomenal number, especially compared to where we were just a year ago: 33k. The scary thing is that under our current growth rate, we will have over a million registered users in roughly 3 months.

Can we double our capacity in just 3 months? Obviously, history implies that it’s possible; we’ve already done much more than that. In fact we’ve done better than that: with little change in infrastructure and much of the same server capacity we’ve managed to make Grooveshark faster and scale at the same time.

On the other hand, much of the low-hanging scalability fruit has been picked now. We use memcached extensively, use a master/slave DB configuration with a data warehouse for logging or writes that don’t need to be processed in real time, and have begun doing some rudimentary sharding for stream-related activities.

What’s left? Well, we aren’t yet at the point where we can scale linearly simply by adding more servers, except probably for streaming servers. For that we need more sharding, primarily. There are still some SQL optimizations that can be made, like bringing session ids down to 16 bytes from 32 (32 on disk and 96 in memory, thanks to utf8) and ultimately getting them out of the database altogether, and using memcached even more heavily, but really all of those things only buy us time. Not that there is anything wrong with buying time, because we also need time to work on new features like last.fm scrobbling, a super-secret redesign, launching on half a dozen mobile platforms, etc., all with a relatively small dev team, but ultimately there are some fundamental architecture changes coming, and if we’re going to keep doubling our number of users every 3 months, it’s going to have to be very soon.

Update: A lot of people have been looking at this post as evidence that we are working on scrobbling support. I should point out that scrobbling support now exists for VIP users: Enable it here.