It was almost a year ago that I made a post about hitting the 500,000 user mark and talked about some of our anticipated scaling issues.
In the past year we’ve grown to over 3.5 million registered users. In the past 30 days we added nearly 500,000. It’s absolutely incredible to me that it took us several years to reach 500,000, and now we add that many without even blinking.
I won’t rehash all the capacity issues we’ve had lately, but needless to say things have been at least as bad as I worried about a year ago. Partially that is because our server capacity has not grown nearly as quickly as our user base has up until now. Fortunately all that is changing, and we are getting a bunch more servers in, and should be growing our capacity more regularly from this point on. We still have infrastructure work to do to scale horizontally better, but at least we will soon have servers to scale horizontally to, a fairly critical piece of the puzzle, I would say. :)
Oh, and here’s what the office was like a year ago:
Thanks for voting for us at Grooveshark! from ben westermann-clark on Vimeo.