Here are some of the highlights (for those with a geek gene) of a Microsoft Enterprise Case Study featuring Match.com.

In June 2001, the new Match.com- consisting of 20 front-end Web servers, running Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services version 5.0 on dual-processor HP ProLiant systems, and three back-end database servers, running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition on quad-processor ProLiant servers- went live.

Developers built their new application using Active Server Pages (ASP) classes to gain modularity of ASP code and took advantage of Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) programming model to access data sources faster and more effectively. They moved significant portions of the site's business logic to SQL Server 2000 stored procedures. The results? Match.com achieved significant performance improvements and was able to scale by a factor of 10 in just one short year.

Before the upgrade, Match was pumping out nearly 30 megabits (MBits) of personal pages per second around the clock. During the first 12 months after going live with the Windows 2000 operating system and outsourcing management of the infrastructure to divine, Match.com scaled its operations significantly- going from 20 Web servers to more than 120 and from 3 database servers to more than 20. Yet in those 12 months, Match.com has gone from pumping out less than 30 MBits of search results per second to pumping out more than 300 MBits of results per second. On a monthly basis, the site now gets more than 1 billion page views.
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