Capacity Planning

A Snapshot of the Site

The microsoft.com site started in 1994 as a single computer under a developer’s desk. It sustained as many as a million hits a day. Today, the site is one of the largest on the Internet. It has far more server hardware and bandwidth than necessary for day-to-day use, but all available capacity is needed for the inevitable spikes that occur when thousands of users concurrently download, register, or participate in some type of online activity, such as with a major product release.

The following figure shows the site, with its hardware and internal connectivity:

The microsoft.com Web Site

Current statistics and resources include:

Traffic

43 million page views per day.
240 million hits per day.
2.5 million users per day.
15 million users per month.
More than 6 GB of successful downloads per day.

Growth

115 percent increase in page views between July 1997 and July 1998.
14 percent increase in users during that twelve-month period.

Content

24 GB of content.
324,000 HTML or ASP files.
307,000 .gif and .jpg files.
About 18 GB of files available for download.
Content updated every three hours worldwide.

Hardware

Over 100 servers for all parts of the site: Compaq Proliant 5000s, 5500s, and 6500s, each with four Pentium Pro processors and 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM. (There are also 30 more servers at other U.S. locations, as well as overseas mirror sites.)
Six internal Ethernets provide 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of capacity each.
2 OCI2 SONET fiber optic lines provide 1.2 gigabits per second of capacity to the Internet.

Software

Microsoft® Windows® NT Server 4.0.
IIS 4.0.
Microsoft® Site Server 3.0.
Microsoft® SQL Server 7.0.
Other Microsoft tools and applications.