Makes me wonder why smaller website teams need dozens of engineers to keep their infinitesimally smaller app running.
Guess they don't have Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky onboard.
StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
11–20 of 278 posts
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#12> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
Their SQL Server is Microsoft SQL Server running on (shock horror) Windows.
Says in the article:
Windows 2012 is used in New York but are upgrading to 2012 R2 (Oregon is already on it).
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#13> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
You can get servers with 384GB of RAM now from a vendor like Dell, without needing to call them for just under $14k.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#14> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
I don't believe that much RAM is uncommon for large scale database servers. 384GB RAM is only about $5000 from Dell. They also have a new server model coming out that supports up to 6TB of RAM [0].
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#15> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
I believe the idea is to hold as much of the DB in memory as possible, for speed, so huge RAM totals on DB servers are not unusual. 384 GB should be well within modern OS reach. Once you're computing at 64 bits, the next theoretical limit on addresses would be somewhere around 16 million terabytes.
edit: wrong number
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#16One smart thing they are doing is putting different sites on different databases. It effectively as a kind of partitioning to allow for horizontal scaling if needed.
If nothing else, it keeps less data in each table, so queries should be faster due to smaller datasets.
Sounds like they know what they are doing.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#17> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
Windows Server handles that much RAM fine, and, so long as it fits, SQL Server will end up caching the entire database in RAM.
If I remember correctly they're using Dell R720's for their SQL Server machines. At current Dell retail pricing 384GB of RAM would be about $5,900.00.
At that price I'd vote for throwing money at raw hardware and reaping the benefits of caching the database in RAM, versus trying to pay programmers to come up with clever techniques to deal with having less RAM.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#18Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#19> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
Not that much, we have 128 gb ram on our hardware.
That is pretty standard for upper midle class rackmounted servers.
64 bit computers has a memmory limit so large that it is not understandeble.
The ram is still lightning fast compared to other stuff.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#20> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
384 GB is fairly easy to achieve today with 16 GB DIMMs x 24 slots (many general purpose servers have up to 24 DIMM slots). Beyond that you need to jump to 24 GB DIMMs which are fairly expensive.