The Twelve Days of Scale-Out: mixi.jp Delivers Massive Scale-Out with MySQL

Third Most-Popular Web Site in Japan

Tokyo -- June 22, 2007 -- MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today concluded its "Twelve Days of Scale-Out" educational initiative by presenting a case study on mixi.jp, the third-most popular Web site in Japan. Each day from June 11-22, the MySQL Web site has been highlighting how many of the world's fastest-growing companies are using the MySQL database to cost-effectively scale-out their successful online businesses.

As Japan's largest social networking site, mixi is the third most-popular Web site in Japan, behind only Yahoo and Google. Its members can create diaries, share photos, post message, and participate in discussions. mixi attributes its success largely to the site's ease-of-use and the ability to deliver a high-performance, scalable platform to meet the demands of its exponentially growing user base.

"MySQL enabled us to scale to over 3 million users in our first two years," said Batara Eto, mixi's Chief Technology Officer. "Mixi relies on MySQL to manage everything from storing profile information to handling all our e-commerce transactions."

mixi's 'Growing' Challenge

Initially, when mixi began as a young start-up, they could not afford expensive proprietary software. Instead, they turned to the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) stack to handle their high-performance computing needs. Within the first two months of launching its site, mixi had 10,000 users and 600,000 page views per day. mixi quickly realized just how popular their service would be. They had signed up their first 3 million users in less than two years -- and now have well over 10 million users creating diaries, posting messages, paying for premium services, and more.

The MySQL database is used to store all profile information, including personal profiles, interests, contact information, and more. Members are able to read and write internal mixi messages to and from other registered members.

One of the primary reasons behind mixi's great success is the content created by users, which allows millions of members to publish and share their personal experiences and stories. These diaries are very write intensive to the database, with a read/write ratio of 15/85. Data is partitioned across multiple MySQL master servers to maximize performance and scalability.

With many social networking services available, mixi is well aware that users won't tolerate slow performance and extended wait times. Initially, they focused on optimizing the system architecture to maximize performance and scalability. mixi's original architecture consisted of a single MySQL server with multiple slaves. This platform served the first generation of users well, but it was clear to mixi that they would need to build an innovative new architecture to cost-effectively scale-out the system to handle their suddenly explosive popularity.

mixi's MySQL Scale-Out Solution

In order to improve performance and scalability, mixi implemented a multi-master system and partitioned their data across numerous masters on two levels: vertically by users and horizontally by table types. The entire system now deploys hundreds of replicated MySQL databases on lower-cost commodity hardware.

Furthermore, memcached is used to alleviate the database load and improve performance. mixi relies on hundreds of MySQL servers and continually adds to the MySQL server farm every month to achieve flexible, linear scalability. Mixi can quickly deploy MySQL servers due to its ease of installation and administration, which translates into reduced administration costs.

mixi employs a very small development team, with each developer being able to manage their own tables, eliminating the need for high cost proprietary DBA skills. Throughout the years, mixi often collaborates with MySQL K.K. by leveraging ideas and architecture innovations through the use of MySQL Professional Services team - to ensure reliability and easy any administration burden. According to mixi, their MySQL servers have been up-and-running for more than two years without any issues.

What is Scale-Out?

Scale-Out is a modern computing architecture that enables organizations to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware. This is in contrast to a ‘Scale-Up’ approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.

This week, MySQL presented a special worldwide technical webinar on “Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses". To view a replay, please visit www.mysql.com/scaleoutwebinar.

About MySQL

MySQL AB develops and supports a family of high-performance, affordable database products. The company’s flagship offering is 'MySQL Enterprise’, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software, with over 11 million active installations. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia and YouTube.

With headquarters in the United States and Sweden -- and operations around the world -- MySQL AB supports both open source values and corporate customers' needs in a profitable, sustainable business model. For more information about MySQL, please visit www.mysql.com.

###

MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the USA and other countries. Other products or company names mentioned may be the trademarks of their respective companies.