I work at a game company that has to deal with large bandwidth usages at time on our web servers. So I’ve always been curious what the back end of the mlb.com website is like. They do a virtual boatload of bandwidth, and I’ve been following the official sites for awhile now. I started this website in December of 1998, and have been with mlb.com since before they centralized all the websites under one banner. Used to be each team “rolled it’s own”, and it was haphazard. Heck, I remember when they didn’t own mlb.com, and you had to enter majorleaguebaseball.com (which still works).
Anyway, as they’ve grown over the years, their bandwidth has jumped, with more archives, video streams, etc, etc. So it was with some interest that I ran across this article tonight which talks a bit about the back end of the mlb.com website. It’s not as in depth as I would have liked, but it is an interesting read if you like baseball and are into web servers. This is my favorite quote from the article:
“After the third out in an inning, everyone goes away, then we have 60 seconds for commercials,” Nelson says. “God forbid they pinch-hit at the top of the next inning. Then half a million people request the same JPEG within a 10-second span. You go from zero to 600 miles per hour really fast.”