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December 7, 1998

GeoCities Copes With Rapid Growth

By Monua Janah

Illustration by August Stein

hat kind of IT system is needed to handle 240 million Web hits a day? GeoCities, a central site for Web-based communities, does it with a cluster of 65 Sun Microsystems Ultra 2 and Enterprise 5000 machines, running Sun's Solaris operating system and the public-domain Apache Web software.

Just 18 months ago, GeoCities, in Marina del Rey, Calif., was receiving 70 million hits a day. Site administrators are managing the rapid growth using Resonate Inc.'s Central Dispatch load-balancing software. Central Dispatch "has helped us to scale up the site," says John Rezner, chief technology officer and co-founder of GeoCities.

Central Dispatch functions like a traffic cop, directing HTML requests to whichever server is least busy.

The servers share a single, virtual IP address. Central Dispatch runs on a separate cluster of seven Ultra 2 machines, any of which can take over for another in case of failure.

Remote Control
The server clusters are located in Santa Clara, in northern California, and managed remotely by GeoCities staff in Marina del Rey and Santa Monica, in the southern part of the state. Hands-on maintenance, such as swapping cards and replacing disks, is outsourced, as is the Internet connection.

GeoCities has set up this arrangement because Internet connectivity is better in the northern part of the state, says Rezner. GeoCities uses built-in tools in Solaris 2.6 for remote administration.

Return to main story, "Mega Web Sites."

Illustration by August Stein