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StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

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Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#41

Post by hueving »

kbenson wrote: post #33

> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…

Definitely. Some of the most efficient C code I have seen is incomprehensible to anyone but a C expert and even then it takes several minutes to understand all of the nuances of what might only be a 4-line function.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#42

Post by itry »

kbenson wrote: post #33

> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…

    users=db.get("SELECT name FROM users WHERE group='admin'")
is more efficient and understandable then:

    users=[];
    tmp=db.get("SELECT name,group FROM users")
    for (i=0;i

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#43

Post by lnanek2 »

habosa wrote: post #5

> 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.

Even before OS'es supported that much people were sticking that much RAM on expansion bus cards and plugging them in and treating them like fast disks. So it is going to happen either way. The performance boost for the DB is just too much compared to it thrashing disks constantly and there are quite a few benefits to having fewer machines compared to many DB servers as well.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#44

Post by lnanek2 »

Really hate the separate sites thing. I use a half dozen of them and they are computer related, so it is a pain in the ass always having to register and not being allowed to comment/answer at first, etc.. They have a few improvements now like importing your profile from other sites, but they shouldn't even have so many separate sites in the first place, just a tag or a category or something.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#45

Post by Cherian »

UVB-76 wrote: post #18

Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?

This has nothing to do with Joel. The decision was from Jeff Attwood. Jeff was a c# veteran and MS stack was the easiest decision to come up with an MVP and the journey from there.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#46

Post by teh_klev »

chiph wrote: post #2

I've recently started using their micro-ORM Dapper, and I like it a lot. I get the performance of hand-coded SQL, but without the tedious mapping from SqlDataReader to my entity.

I've been using Dapper for around three years, "it just works" and is very fast. I've been around the block a few times with ORM's - LINQ to SQL, NHibernate, Entity Framework, Massive, SubSonic. For small to medium size projects there's no contest, provided you don't mind hand crafting your SQL. Hat's off to Marc, Sam and team for building this.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#47

Post by teh_klev »

MasterScrat wrote: post #11
lemcoe9 wrote: post #3

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.

Joel is very much still around and active. Jeff went off to build Discourse [0] although I think he still has a place at the co-founder table as invisible-benevolent-dictator.

[0]: http://www.discourse.org/

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#48

Post by recursive »

lnanek2 wrote: post #44

Really hate the separate sites thing. I use a half dozen of them and they are computer related, so it is a pain in the ass always having to register and not being allowed to comment/answer at first, etc.. They have a few improvements now like importing your profile from other sites, but they shouldn't even have so many separate sites in the first place, just a tag or a category or something.

You get +100 rep bonus for linking your accounts, so you shouldn't have a problem being allowed to comment.

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#49

Post by valarauca1 »

lemcoe9 wrote: post #3

Makes me wonder why smaller website teams need dozens of engineers to keep their infinitesimally smaller app running.

There are hundreds of reasons at nearly every level of a company that can contribute to this situation. Its best summed up by Sturgeons Law, "90% of everything is crap."

Re: StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

#50

Post by atonse »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #6
chiph wrote: post #2

I've recently started using their micro-ORM Dapper, and I like it a lot. I get the performance of hand-coded SQL, but without the tedious mapping from SqlDataReader to my entity.

Dapper is great - I promptly dumped NHibernate and Entity Framework for it. It's the only ORM I've found that makes it trivially easy (as it should be) to use stored procedures and views in queries.

+1 for Dapper - I'm a big fan. It is very fast and we use it to serve our live (mostly read-only) traffic, while using something like Entity Framework for the backend Administrative UI, which has a lot of inserts and updates.
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