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(Internal) Customer Spotlight - Synchronization Scalability and Live Toolbar

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One of the most common (and most dreaded) questions anyone who writes a synchronization technology will get is “How well does it scale”?  I say dreaded because it is an incredibly difficult thing to state with 100% certainty that a product will scale to X number of concurrent users for all customer scenarios.  There are just too many variables, such as the amount of data being transferred, how fast the machines are, how much memory there is, what is the throughput of the network connection, etc.  To help us answer these questions, sometimes we can point to specific benchmarks or customer implementation examples.   One of the most recent examples of high scale sync that we can look at is Live Toolbar.   For those who have not tried it, Live Toolbar is a technology used by many millions of users across the world.  Live Toolbar works as a plug-in within your Internet Explorer browser and gives you quick access to Windows Live and Live Search. 

In the latest version of Live Toolbar, you can now share your favorite websites with people in your network on Windows Live. You can also sync your Internet Explorer favorites across multiple PCs—sign in and access them from any computer where you’ve installed the Windows Live Toolbar. 

This favorite synchronization capability is accomplished through the use of the Microsoft Sync Framework.  The favorite sync feature consolidates your favorites into a central Windows Live storage server in the cloud allowing you to then share them and view them from anywhere.  This feature is rolling out across the world and is currently only available in US and Taiwan, however, it still shows a potential of being able to being able to handle a huge scale of millions of synchronization users through the use of Microsoft Sync Framework.

Liam Cavanagh

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2009
    We recently updated our official MSF blog with three new Customer Spotlight case study data detailing

  • Anonymous
    March 29, 2009
    关于微软同步框架(Microsoft Sync Framework，以下简称MSF)的众多问题中，经常听到的，也是最让人担心与质疑的一个问题是：“微软同步框架（MSF）的在大数据规模下，使用效果如何？” 之所以说“担心”二字，是因为：按照严谨的态度和方法，去效验一个产品在大数据量、并发用户下，能否可以正常使用，模拟其环境是一件非常困难的事情，其中存在了太多的变数。