I'm visiting with some of my young nieces and nephews today. They're between the ages of 9 and 12 and they are all Habbo Hotel power users. (Their parents thought it was "Hobbit Hotel" so I guess they are not power users!) If you don't have young kids or nieces and nephews, you may not know it, but Habbo Hotel is virtual meeting place and game environment for teens. They can buy, sell and trade furniture to create rooms in their hotel. It's run by Sulake Corporation of Finland which is one of Europe's fastest growing technology companies.
Habbo Hotel runs on a LAMP stack using MySQL 5.0 with databases that range from hundreds of Gigabytes to Terabytes in size using a mixture of transactional and non-transactional storage engines. They achieve performance levels of tens of thousands of events per second scaling out with dozens of multi-CPU …
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