Why does digg need so many servers?

Re:Why does digg need so many servers? by Goladus on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:22PM (#1787668)

Where does the "500 servers" number come from?

Are they compute nodes? Are they webservers(5)? Webservers and appservers(10)? Web, app, database(12)? Web, app, database, back-end processing(15)? How much redundancy is built in(30)? Staging environments(60)? Development environments(120)? Standard IT infrastructure like DNS and email(125)?

"We run over 500 servers" sounds a lot like "we have 500 servers in our datacenters" not "it takes 500 servers to handle 200MM page views."

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Re:Why does digg need so many servers? by sfrench on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:47PM (#1787795)

I used to work at digg as a engineer. I won't say your distribution numbers are correct, but you've got the gist. There are multiple environments, reserved capacity, research and testing machines, etc.

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Re:Why does digg need so many servers? by jasonlotito on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @12:42PM (#1787768)

Pretty sure those numbers discount serving up Digg information out to every blog that includes a Digg button as well. Pretty sure if SO adding something like it, they'd be running on more than 5 servers.

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