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December 7, 1998

Monster Board Scales Up

By Natalie Engler

Illustration by August Stein

onster Board, a job-listing Web site that receives 5 million visitors a month, expects a sharp increase in traffic in January and about four times as many visitors in 1999 compared with this year. To be ready, the site is installing 17 Dell PowerEdge 6300 servers, at a cost of about $1 million.

Monster Board, a subsidiary of TMP Worldwide, lists jobs from 50,000 employers, making it popular among job seekers. The site is bracing for that spike in January when it runs an advertisement during the Super Bowl, and it expects traffic to keep rising after that.

Room To Grow
The Windows NT-based Dell servers, each with four Pentium Xeon processors and a gigabyte of RAM, give the site room to grow. The systems run Microsoft's SQL Server database. And since May, Monster Board has been using a load-sharing switch from HydraWeb Technologies Inc., which routes traffic to the least-used server, increasing speed and scalability.

"We could buy another 20 servers and put them behind the HydraWeb box and scale to 20 times the load," says Jonathan Lynch, Monster Board's director of development. The switch also provides redundancy.

Monster Board has partitioned its applications so different tasks are performed on different servers, and it identifies bottlenecks using NT's performance monitor. When possible, Monster Board creates read-only data sets as a way of maintaining fast response times.

Says Bill Warren, director of IT, "If your site doesn't respond quickly, people don't come back."

Return to main story, "Mega Web Sites."

Illustration by August Stein