So basically, through careful engineering, they can run stackoverflow.com, one of the top-ten sites in the world, on a single web server and a single database server. Beefy machines for sure, but it kind of takes the air out of the web-scale hype balloon.
Re:Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
by brianwawok on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:11PM
(#11857407)
Ya I love this as a counterpoint to much scaling.
Stackoverflow has pretty good uptime and pretty good performance, can't fault the end result.
> one of the top-ten sites in the world
49th actually: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com
Re:Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
by toomuchtodo on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:12PM
(#11857896)
Physical servers they host themselves, mind you.
Re:Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
by Bromskloss on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:03PM
(#11859050)
Huh? Why are they running Windows?
I don't know about the rest of the (initial) team, but Joel was lead on Excel as I recall. If you have a group if devs that know the nt kernel, SQL server and iis very well - why would you not use the ms stack?
Don't get me wrong, I prefer Linux and Free software myself - but that doesn't mean the thousands of Man years sybase and ms have spent on their stack is wasted effort.
Because they thought it was the better choice for them. You cannot argue with the result.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-StackExchange-StackOverflow-u...
I still think containers are great, and I really like the abstractions kubernetes provides, but if I ever had enough traffic to worry about scaling, I envision running a small cluster of very powerful computers rather than 100s of weak ones.