Online daters are usually only interested in the “front end” of dating sites, commonly called the user interface or user experience. We are blissfully unaware of the many complicated technology systems put in place to deal with our searches for left-handed 6-foot South American straight men weighing 175 lbs with short brown hair who like football.
As someone who’s helped build scores of dating sites from cocktail napkin planning stage to “we need more servers!”, the techie in me loves hearing about how large-scale websites are built, what they run on and how they operate (not that I understand it all).
As online dating gets more popular, new systems and ways for handling millions of members are continuously being devised. Facebook is king in this department. They have had to basically invent most of the technology they use to handle hundreds of millions of daily users, status updates and photo uploads.
Eharmony and Plentyoffish have been fairly open about discussing the hard-core IT infrastructure they have in place. Here we have Chris Coyne at OkCupid weighing in on a question on Quora, Is OkCupid programmed in only C++?. Its great to see OKCupid share details about their systems.
From a sysadmin standpoint: we’re currently running 6 cheap webservers and they each comfortably handle over 500 non-image HTTP requests per second during peak time.
That is so hot :-)
A site like Match probably spends north of $10 million a year on infrastructure and support and its been years since Plentyoffish was a one-man operation running on a few servers. Nice to see OKCupid keeping things small.
More details about the OKCupid webserver (which they wrote themselves!)
