They certainly made some bad choices along the way, but I can't even imagine the level of stress their engineers must have been under while dealing with the daily growth problems. It must have been insane.

Some will point out that if they used LAMP, MySpace would have less problems, errors, and could scale better... I'm not so sure about that though. When you consider the numbers of requests coming in, the constant publishing of content on the site, and the ever growing userbase, it's nearly an impossible situation.

You'll see that they've finally settled on Microsoft products and technology to stay online - almost fully ditching ColdFusion. Does this mean ColdFusion can't scale? No, not at all. As you'll see in the article, they took a look at every function and worked to optimize the code on the last rewrite. If they did this originally with the ColdFusion design, I'm sure they would have been able to keep scaling. Plus, the state of their application at the time when they selected to move to .NET sounded like spaghetti code.