Match.com Post Mortem
Well, I never really talked about how things went with our Match.com 5.0 roll-out and implementation.
Amazingly, it was one of the smoothest, most successful development projects and roll-outs that I've ever been involved with. We recoded an entire (HUGE!) site in about 8 months, including definition and design.
On June 12 at 2:00am in the morning, with a Microsoft representative on site, we went dark, taking all 104 servers (running Match.com 4.0/ASP.OLD) out from behind the load balancer and redeploying 45 new servers (running Windows 2003) into the VIP and going back live.
Holding our breath, we opened our eyes to look at the operations screens and perf mons running... and all was well.
A little initial CPU hit (maybe 10-15% increase) across the web farm while the site JIT compiled, but then leveled out around 20% CPU utilization. The GC did it's merry little job, and memory stays flat. Never moves.
And, at the end of the day, we ended up with 49 assemblies, and just over 500k lines of code.
Again, in a word: Amazing.
At the end of the day, we cut our server farm in half to a site that is twice as fast, and twice as easy to debug, maintain, and build upon. We saved the business hundreds of thousands of dollars, and will continue to be able to do so because we can offer extremely fast development cycles.
One of the greatest accomplishments in my career, and one that I'm very proud of. And, one that says alot about .NET and the thought, planning and implementation that Microsoft has put into it.