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StackOverflow Is Down

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Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#41

Post by alexjplant »

ec109685 wrote: post #28
artimaeis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Hanselman had an interview with the Stack Overflow Director of Engineering just a few weeks ago. They cover some high-level details there [0]. As I understand it's an .NET Core monolith with a very-large (~1.5 TB RAM) SQL Server backend. [0] https://hanselminutes.com/847/engineering-stack-overflow-wit...

One thing about using SQL databases live in production for everything is that the architecture is amazingly simple, almost always performant, but if something goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. Amazon for new critical applications prefers NoSQL solutions for this reason since performance is flatter and not dependent on vagaries of the query optimizer.

From what I've gleaned through speaking to current and former Amazon employees you basically have to use DynamoDB for all new services.

IMHO the logical progression for applications with typical relational models is starting with an RDBMS in combination with an ORM, breaking out of the ORM when necessary for more complex/slower queries, ditching the ORM altogether when it starts to break, then evaluating sharding or moving domains into a NoSQL solution piecemeal. A well-architected monolith or series of microservices suits this paradigm which allows you to realize the productivity benefits of SQL and only worry about the deduplication, indexing, and consistency issues that come with NoSQL when it becomes actually necessary.

Then again if I were Amazon I'd probably plan for scale up front and be jaded by their experience with Oracle too.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#43

Post by 300bps »

pugworthy wrote: post #39
blacklight wrote: post #9

And this is at least the 4th or 5th time within 10 days that either the website is down or performance is badly degraded. So bad for a website that is basically the go-to resource where IT professionals get their answers. So bad that the whole platform is closed-source, so we can't even spin multiple instances. The main resource used by developers and sysadmins around the world is locked and centralized, and when tha…

I’m not trying to be funny but it’s interesting how much panic one can read in the parent comment. We all joke about the dependency on SO. It seems to actually be more true than perhaps we’d like to admit.

It’s unjustified panic. It’s freely downloadable and available everywhere.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#44

Post by mark-r »

distantsounds wrote: post #31
mark-r wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much harder to work with the data if you don't have the code. SO is not open source.

https://www.rickcarlino.com/2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-... not so sure about that

That's kind of cool, thanks. How long does it take to do a web scrape versus a DB dump?

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#45

Post by mproud »

racl101 wrote: post #10

You mean I gotta start thinking on my own? Not sure that will work.

Time to take a long lunch. Hopefully it’ll be back soon, otherwise I’ll have to invent a reason to give to my boss on why I can’t get back to the office!

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#46

Post by drewzero1 »

coffeeblack wrote: post #23
racl101 wrote: post #10

You mean I gotta start thinking on my own? Not sure that will work.

I am using the Stackoverflow Keyboard. How am I supposed to type code now?

I had a good laugh, thanks. Never knew that was a thing[1] but it totally made my day.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-...

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#47

Post by ctvo »

SE has been an incredibly well ran company.

- FREE

- Permissive content license

- Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer

- Few / limited ads

- Data available at archive.org

- Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof.

I think about LinkedIn, Github, ... the other large platforms we use for work, and SE is the only one that hasn't gone downhill.

No, I don't want them to open source the platform. No, I don't think you can do better. Yes, a few mirrors for redundancy would be excellent, but not urgent. Discoverability here would be the challenge for mirrors. They've been down less than a day total for me in 10+ years of using them.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#48

Post by goto11 »

ravenstine wrote: post #38
connordoner wrote: post #2

For anyone looking on this from the future, the error page has Content-Type set to text/html but literally returns the text: "The service is unavailable." and a newline character.

That's valid HTML.

A title-element is required for the HTML to be valid. It is the only required element AFAIK.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#49

Post by zshrdlu »

ollien wrote: post #4
Victerius wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

I know you're joking, but an SE employee (I believe it was Nick Craver, who is now a former SE SRE) mentioned on Twitter a while ago that employees use database backups and spin up local instances for exactly this reason...

Sounds a lot less straight-forward than using the cached result from Google or acrhive.org...

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#50

Post by jodrellblank »

ctvo wrote: post #47

SE has been an incredibly well ran company. - FREE - Permissive content license - Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer - Few / limited ads - Data available at archive.org - Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof. I think about LinkedIn, Github, ... the other large platforms we use for work, and SE is the only one that hasn't gone downhill. No, I don't want them to open source the…

> "Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof."

Owned by a VC firm, isn't it? https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-1...

after https://vcnewsdaily.com/stack-overflow/venture-capital-fundi...

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