Michael Dolan Dot Com

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Windows Scalability Issues at Xbox Live?

Looks like Microsoft is having trouble scaling to keep up with peaks in demand…. unfortunately being an x86 only platform (I guess Itanic is an option), Windows cannot take advantage of features like capacity upgrade on demand or other UNIX/Linux/Mainframe scalability features… perhaps Microsoft could run its Xbox Live server apps on a Linux mainframe using Mono?

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records.  This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break.  While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance.  I would like to take this moment to thank each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.