I think you misunderstand my use of unremarkable. It's not wrong or bad but key parts are the same stack you'd have picked 1-2 decades ago – well implemented, values scaled up, yes, but something you could have shown people in 2000 and not had to explain more than that the hardware costs so much less.
I think that's good: SQL databases are very mature and you don't want to be exciting for your core business data if you don't get some major benefit to defray the cost. Boring is a delightful characteristic for data storage.
Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by user5994461 on Sunday April 09, 2017 @10:00AM
(#14072307)
My bad then. I think that using a proven technology perfectly tuned and the way it's meant to be done, is remarkable. This should be promoted more, instead of the new and shiny.
I'm not sure you could get 1TB of memory and multi TB SSD drives anywhere in the 2000's, even for a million dollar. That makes a major difference in the ability to scale up. Data didn't grow, storing 1M user account always took the same space.
Agreed that data sizes would have been far more of a challenge – far more people used clustered services just because a single box only supported so much RAM, RAID arrays for IOPs and size as well as redundancy, etc. – so it's arguably become much easier for a growing chunk of the industry.
Wrong, and wrong.
First, their architecture is extremely remarkable. They are doing and mastering vertical scaling, down to every little details. Terabytes of RAM, C# instead of Ruby/Python, FusionIO drives, MS SQL instead of MySQL/PostGre, etc...
Second, that's at least 6 database servers, each one being more expensive than 10 usual commodity servers:
First cluster: Dell R720xd servers, 384GB of RAM, 4TB of PCIe SSD space, and 2x 12 cores. It hosts the Stack Overflow, Sites (bad name, I’ll explain later), PRIZM, and Mobile databases.
Second cluster: Dell R730xd servers, 768GB of RAM, 6TB of PCIe SSD space, 2x 8 cores. This cluster runs everything else. That list includes Careers, Open ID, Chat, our Exception log, and every other Q&A site (e.g. Super User, Server Fault, etc.).