Re:Stack Overflow Architecture
by dasil003 on Thursday July 16, 2009 @01:23AM
(#707353)
Great high level summary. Given current work scaling up a smaller site (3million pageviews/month) with more social networking functionality is that Stack Overflow ought to be pretty amenable to caching. Obviously it's pretty interactive so it's somewhere middle of the road. But what's a real cache killer are the types of per-user customization that Facebook does. Not to take anything away from Stack Overflow, but it seems like it ought to be served pretty well by standard techniques whereas something like Facebook obviously needs some juicy custom middleware. Would love to see an article about that.
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Calling what Facebook does "per user customization" is a big understatement. Nobody except your (relatively) tiny circle of friends ever sees the data you upload to Facebook, that's why they store petabytes of data and StackOverflow only has 48 GB of them.
StackOverflow does some pretty clever things like using JavaScript to dim or hilight questions on the front page based on the user's Ignored or Interested tags, instead of generating a unique set of front page items HTML for every user.
This might be clever for them but I hate seeing these dimmed items, dimmed != ignored.
True for me as well even here on HN; I go out of my way to read downvoted comments when they're barely legible by highlighting them.
They're dimmed because they have a tag that is in the user's list of "ignored tags" - not because of downvotes.