How microsoft solved the problem of 50000 mails
A legendary problem!
In the early 2000s, Microsoft's Hotmail service was facing a massive issue with email storage. The service was growing rapidly, and the team was struggling to keep up with the increasing volume of emails. At one point, the system was storing over 50,000 emails per second, which was causing performance issues and making it difficult to manage the service.
To put this into perspective, the average email account at the time was storing around 10-20 MB of data. With 50,000 emails per second, that's equivalent to storing around 500-1000 GB of data per second! This was an enormous amount of data, and the team was struggling to keep up with the growth.
To solve this problem, Microsoft's engineering team implemented several solutions:
- Distributed Storage: They moved away from a centralized storage model and implemented a distributed storage system, where data was stored across multiple servers. This allowed them to scale more easily and reduce the load on individual servers.
- Caching: They implemented caching mechanisms to reduce the number of times the system had to access the underlying storage. This helped to improve performance and reduce the load on the storage system.
- Data Compression: They implemented data compression algorithms to reduce the size of the email data being stored. This helped to reduce the amount of storage required and improve performance.
- Database Optimization: They optimized their database schema and query performance to improve the speed and efficiency of email storage and retrieval.
- Load Balancing: They implemented load balancing techniques to distribute the traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server was overwhelmed.
- Scalability: They designed the system to be highly scalable, allowing them to easily add more servers and storage as needed to keep up with the growing volume of emails.
These solutions allowed Microsoft to overcome the challenge of storing 50,000 emails per second and continue to provide a reliable and scalable email service to their users.
It's worth noting that this problem was a major challenge for Microsoft at the time, and it required significant investment and innovation to solve. The solution ultimately involved a combination of technical expertise, creative problem-solving, and a willingness to rethink the underlying architecture of the system.