Can anyone provide context on "Heavy usage of static classes and methods, for simplicity and better performance."
Is performance _really_ an issue here?
StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
21–30 of 278 posts
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#22> AWS would cost a fortune.
Isn't that comparing apples to oranges? Taking any application built for large servers and putting the same application onto a cloud-based architecture will be more expensive.
Cloud-based architecture requires ground up differences in how the application is built. Now whether or not it is better to use a cloud-based approach or traditional bare metal is highly subjective and isn't my point.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#23Extremely interesting read, especially because it goes against many fashionable engineering practices. They see (correctly) that abstractions, DI have their own compromises. Also, they're not religious (about technology), that's also quite rare.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#24Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?
It's a Microsoft/Linux hybrid. SQL Server on the backend, Linux for monitoring, Redis, HAProxy, etc.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#25> 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.
There are a few erroneous replies to your comment, re: Windows support for that much memory.
Memory support for versions of Windows:
User-mode process Kernel-mode
address space address space
(process bit-ness)
32-bit 64-bit all
Server Operating Systems:
Windows Server 2008 R2 4 GB* 2048 GB 2048 GB
Windows Server 2012 4 GB* 4096 GB 4096 GB
Windows Server 2012 R2 4 GB* 131072 GB 131072 GB
Client Operating Systems:
Windows 7 (x86) 3 GB* n/a 2 GB
Windows 7 (64-bit) 4 GB* 192 GB 192 GB
Windows 8 (64-bit) 4 GB* 512 GB 512 GB
Windows 8.1 (64-bit) 4 GB* 131072 GB 131072 GB
* requires IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag, otherwise 2GB
** All units use binary exponents (GB = 2^30 bytes)Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#26Makes me wonder why smaller website teams need dozens of engineers to keep their infinitesimally smaller app running.
Rigid adherence to certain technologies could be a culprit. "We're a Ruby shop!" is fine for problems where Ruby is great, but the limitations of the technology are bound to creep up somewhere. Not using a polyglot approach would be bad.
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#27Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?
Anyone who knows Joel Spolsky would expect a MS stack :)
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#28Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?
No. Why not?
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#29> 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.
It's not a server, but I've seen machines used in physics simulations have something on the order of 256 GB RAM in them. As far as I know they cost maybe $20k-$30k, so not absurdly expensive. I don't think addressing that memory is a problem on any x64 architecture. Windows Server 2012 has a 4TB upper limit on RAM, apparently [1], and as far as I can tell there's no reason for this other than product differentiation…
$4k is all you need to build a whitebox 256GB machine: dual-socket G34 motherboard with 16 DDR3 slots lke the ASUS KGPE-D16 ($500) + two Opteron 6320 (2 * $300) + sixteen 16GB registered ECC DDR3-1600 (16 * $160) + chassis/PSU ($500) = $4160.
Doing this on Amazon r3.8xlarge ($2.8/hr) would cost you $8100+ over 4 months.
A DIY server can make sense in some cases. Eg. you are a very early-stage startup with almost no funding, and you are good at assembling and troubleshooting computers, and are ok with mere warranty on parts as opposed to full vendor support from HP/Oracle/Dell, go for it. That's how many startups started (see Google and their makeshift half-donated half-loaned boxes in 1998).
Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
#30"One problem is not many tests. Tests aren’t needed because there’s a great community... If users find any problems with it they report the bugs that they’ve found." I'm often surprised at the paucity of test-coverage in relatively large companies. http://nerds.airbnb.com/testing-at-airbnb/
That bullet point surprised me. It comes right after "110K lines of code. A small number given what it does"; to me this reads like they didn't write tests because that would add complexity.
Can any SO devs give us more details on "not many tests"? Or how many bug reports get filed vs rate of change of software?