Modthesims Fan Site likes MariaDB's Extra Features
Modthesims.info is the world's largest fansite dedicated to The Sims™ games (The Sims 2, 3, and all the expansions). The site gets over 40 million page views a month, and uses over twenty terabytes of bandwidth to serve the voracious appetites of Sims gamers.
The site is based on a heavily customised version of vBulletin, using primarily MyISAM tables. The database server is powered by a Intel Harpertown 4-core 8GB machine, and caching via Membase and xcache is used heavily.
"Even though this is 'just' a fansite, it gets used by a lot of users and any kind of downtime is noticed almost immediately by the masses, so obviously a reliable database system is key," says founder Delphy. Modthesims.info has been using MariaDB since the 5.1 release in February 2010.
On why Delphy picked MariaDB: "It's basically compatible with MySQL, but with extra features."