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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

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Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#171

Post by adventured »

lazyjones wrote: post #42
petercooper wrote: post #2

The guy behind PlentyOfFish (the dating site) has written similar things in the past. Various links and tech info: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily , making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). Becoming a member of their "Bi…

Don't forget StackOverflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch... - apart from the somewhat unbelievable PlentyOffish project, it's the only prestige project based on MS software most people will recall. In their 2011 update, they claimed to be using "a lot more Linux machines", because apparently it's fun to develop using Microsoft technology, but for some infrastructure components (proxyin…

Plenty Of Fish shouldn't be considered unbelievable. I've been following information about their infrastructure from the first moment they posted about it. There's nothing unbelievable about it at all. Over the years he has openly described changes to the site's setup as they've scaled, and it makes fine sense.

Stack isn't the only prestige product. Nearly all of Microsoft's infrastructure runs on their own dog food. That's a lot bigger of a product than Stack Exchange is.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#172

Post by TheAnimus »

etherael wrote: post #154
51Cards wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cons; > Everyone has to use Windows. That is a personal opinion. To me it's not a "Con", just a personal choice. I work on both platforms (Windows and Linux) and I don't view either one as a Pro or a Con. Just a different environment. If it's not your first choice doesn't make it a bad choice, which I think summarizes a lot of the article in question.

It's a con because everyone has to use windows, not because of using windows, an open source tech stack typically works just fine with both Linux and Mac using devs, and has leftovers for windows users. An MS stack? Everyone's stuck using windows, and many people hate it. That's what's bad about it, not that windows is necessarily bad in every use case.

>everyone has to use windows

They do?! Oh dear, I'd better tell the DBAs about that.

They only need to use windows if they want to run IIS or Visual Studio.

There is a hell of a lot more to the sort of infrastructure a lot of people use .Net for than that. Hell I was working with a bizarre mainframe relic last year in it.

That isn't to say for a lot of usages, anything that isn't the latest windows is a poor relation, the latest debugging features for TPL require 8.1.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#173

Post by regularfry »

twistedpair wrote: post #94
hapless wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MySQL is possibly the single hardest database to port to/from, because it supports nothing .

In that case porting FROM it should be simple. TO it would be hard if you're using all those fancy features of your current DB. That's why I eschew all the sirens from Oracle DBA's of "oh... but Oracle can do that too!" Keep database activities in the database and application activities in the app.

In my experience, MySQL lets you get into a state where questions like "hang, on - what's the difference between a DATE of '0000-00-00' and NULL?" are commonplace. This makes porting from it... not simple.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#174

Post by adventured »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #135
mattmanser wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more enlightening and people might agree with you if you told us what was going wrong to cause you such pain? I have had many windows servers and often you can almost just forget about them entirely once they're setup, which takes all of like 2 hours even if you're using a whole new stack.

Excellent point. I apologize for my brevity in my previous posts. I agree that you can't color Microsoft's server offerings by their older products (Server 2000, 2003). I do agree that 2008/2012 are much more solid products comparitively speaking, but I still would not use them in a production environment for several reasons: Debugging: Have you ever attempted to debug edge case issues in a Windows server environment…

I'm curious what the specs were on those 6,000 CMS boxes? Do you happen to recall?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#175

Post by RyanZAG »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #100
free652 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I hate VS so much, Eclipse is so much better! I guess it's just personal preference. I like C# a little more than Java, but I cant stand assemblies. Jars are much easier to handle. edit: Troll? Not. Like a very simple thing: quick watch in debug blocks the edit window? Really WTF?! I have to move it the second screen to see the actual code. I can name a lot of these small annoyances.

I can't help but feel like you're trolling. Eclipse is a slow, bloated, feature-laking pile of crap. I honestly can't believe anyone would prefer it to, well, just about anything else. I've used it and I get by on it when necessary, but in terms of preference its at the bottom of my list.

Rubbish. Use the latest version with an SSD with 8GB ram and it flies - SSD and ram are cheap enough to not be a barrier to entry, either. It's got more features than any other IDE I can think of, as well as a pretty huge library of plugins. Sounds like you're the one that is trolling. If Eclipse really was that bad, nobody would use it, and it wouldn't be probably the most widely used IDE in the world.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#176

Post by seanc722 »

Retric wrote: post #138
etherael wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL databases in general don't scale well once they've maxed out a single machine, cross server joins are never going to be pretty and there's a pretty good reason why denormalising data and the adoption of NoSQL solutions with baked in clustering is taking off in a big way. Re NoSQL solutions on windows, theoretically possible, sure, but which NoSQL solution targets windows as its primary platform rather than an aft…

In our tests NoSQL was far slower than SQL solutions the advantage was it dealt with hardware failures more easily, but if you use 5% as much hardware it's far less of an issue. Edit: I think one of the largest probmems is most developers doin't understand SQL or databases that well. Indexed Views for example are an incredibly efficient tools that allow you to avoid a lot of expensive joins without the normal risks o…

Have any resources that explain Views and the efficiency vs a query..? I thought views had the same performance of the underlying SQL statements.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#177

Post by etherael »

TheAnimus wrote: post #172
etherael wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a con because everyone has to use windows, not because of using windows, an open source tech stack typically works just fine with both Linux and Mac using devs, and has leftovers for windows users. An MS stack? Everyone's stuck using windows, and many people hate it. That's what's bad about it, not that windows is necessarily bad in every use case.

>everyone has to use windows They do?! Oh dear, I'd better tell the DBAs about that. They only need to use windows if they want to run IIS or Visual Studio. There is a hell of a lot more to the sort of infrastructure a lot of people use .Net for than that. Hell I was working with a bizarre mainframe relic last year in it. That isn't to say for a lot of usages, anything that isn't the latest windows is a poor relation…

> They do?! Oh dear, I'd better tell the DBAs about that.

You mean the MS SQL DBA's? Cause generally that's what people in MS shops are going to be working with, should they not be able to run tests on MS SQL and write SQL scripts locally to actually test on their environment and get results? Perhaps I do not understand what being a DBA actually entails, but I assumed that it would necessitate extensive experience with the actual database, up to and including running it yourself locally for development?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#178

Post by pjmlp »

etherael wrote: post #154
51Cards wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cons; > Everyone has to use Windows. That is a personal opinion. To me it's not a "Con", just a personal choice. I work on both platforms (Windows and Linux) and I don't view either one as a Pro or a Con. Just a different environment. If it's not your first choice doesn't make it a bad choice, which I think summarizes a lot of the article in question.

It's a con because everyone has to use windows, not because of using windows, an open source tech stack typically works just fine with both Linux and Mac using devs, and has leftovers for windows users. An MS stack? Everyone's stuck using windows, and many people hate it. That's what's bad about it, not that windows is necessarily bad in every use case.

Given that most companies standardize one specific OS this is not that big issue.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#179

Post by pstuart »

throwit1979 wrote: post #165
TheAnimus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons I think it is not about Linux in isolation, but about the fancy, over hyped tech stacks you see people using. About 6 months ago I was having a few days off, out in the wilderness so to speak, I decided to try this whole Go thing. When reading about it, I thought nice I like the actor paradigm, I was doing a prime solver from someone's tutorial, and... It was slow. Not…

Go was about 20% of the speed of the java one You're probably doing something wrong. Go tops the techempower benchmarks for concurrent db access and page rendering, and for pure math performance, it has an average case performance of 17% slower than Java( highly dependent on problem chosen of course ) refs: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

And that's with Go 1.1 vs. Java 6 or 7.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#180

Post by [deleted] »

regularfry wrote: post #173
twistedpair wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case porting FROM it should be simple. TO it would be hard if you're using all those fancy features of your current DB. That's why I eschew all the sirens from Oracle DBA's of "oh... but Oracle can do that too!" Keep database activities in the database and application activities in the app.

In my experience, MySQL lets you get into a state where questions like "hang, on - what's the difference between a DATE of '0000-00-00' and NULL?" are commonplace. This makes porting from it... not simple.

[deleted]
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