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Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

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Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#41

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

threeseed wrote: post #34
mupuff1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Normal" sized services should be adequate enough for that purpose.

Microservices became a synonym for Services Orientated Architecture years ago. It's almost always relatively normal sized services split by functional area e.g. Auth, Cache etc.

Hehehe. This is absolutely true and trying to explain it to anyone around me makes me feel like a Cassandra quoting battlestar galactica: "All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again". I'm not even old, I just happened to witness the tail end of SOA when I was still a student, followed by the rise of micro-services afterwards. Your service mesh is just someone else's message bus. Sure, it's different. Except not really. Also, bonus points for younger developers reinventing features for json APIs that SOAP already had.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#44

Post by jameshart »

atonse wrote: post #14

Even though I love their simplicity as an example of how to be pragmatic and not over-engineer, do remember that they’ve tuned their code to the point that they built an ORM that is one of the fastest in the NET world. I used it and it was awesomely lightweight. It’s as much an example of how far world class talent can go, as it is about doing more with less.

Right - Marc Gravell and Tim Craver, who worked on the core architecture of Stack Overflow, were both so obsessive about extracting performance from .net web applications that when they couldn’t do any more from the outside, they both quit and went to work for Microsoft on performance improvements in the framework itself.

I feel like it’s similar to how people point to Craigslist as evidence that you can still build sites in Perl - ignoring the fact that Craigslist has Larry Wall on a retainer.

Running highly scalable monoliths is easy! As long as you’re willing to hire some of the five to ten people in the world who are capable of advancing the state of the art of development on that technology stack…

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#45

Post by kkielhofner »

tiffanyh wrote: post #39

> Removed Redis 4 years ago; average latency remained unchanged at 20ms. A hidden taken away is that NVMe storage databases are so fast, they are comparable to in-memory (redis) databases these days.

Throwing 1.5TB of RAM in the SQL Server (server) has to help too!

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#46

Post by eduction »

The best cache is the one built into the database. People seem to forget that the major rdbmses have sophisticated cache strategies of their own and that handing them more RAM (and ensuring they are configured to use it for query or other cache) is usually a good first strategy before trying to second guess and reinvent the cache outside the db.

Thread says SO allocates 1.5TB RAM to SQL Server. Sounds wise.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#47

Post by smitty1e »

threeseed wrote: post #34
mupuff1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Normal" sized services should be adequate enough for that purpose.

Microservices became a synonym for Services Orientated Architecture years ago. It's almost always relatively normal sized services split by functional area e.g. Auth, Cache etc.

SOA was all XML at the API level.

Serverless is RESTful, lower-level, and coupled to the cloud-provider's menu of containers, key/value store, authentication, &c.

"Synonymous" seems a stretch.

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#48

Post by tiffanyh »

kkielhofner wrote: post #45
tiffanyh wrote: post #39

> Removed Redis 4 years ago; average latency remained unchanged at 20ms. A hidden taken away is that NVMe storage databases are so fast, they are comparable to in-memory (redis) databases these days.

Throwing 1.5TB of RAM in the SQL Server (server) has to help too!

> [1.5TB of RAM] that is a third of the entire Q&A dataset.

Yes, but maybe not as much as you’d think.

https://twitter.com/sahnlam/status/1629713961951330304

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#49

Post by Spooky23 »

kichik wrote: post #24

Is there a website that tracks outages of other websites like Stack Overflow over years? I know some that tell you if it's down right now, but not over years. I have a subjective feeling that Stack Overflow is down a lot more than other websites. I don't see that ever mentioned in the discussion of cloud vs on-prem which makes the discussion seem lacking.

That’s an engineering choice not cloud vs. cloud. How many services are down when AWS us-east has a problem?

Re: Stack Overflow is a cacheless, 9-server on-prem monolith

#50

Post by capableweb »

didntreadarticl wrote: post #29
kichik wrote: post #24

Is there a website that tracks outages of other websites like Stack Overflow over years? I know some that tell you if it's down right now, but not over years. I have a subjective feeling that Stack Overflow is down a lot more than other websites. I don't see that ever mentioned in the discussion of cloud vs on-prem which makes the discussion seem lacking.

http://stats.pingdom.com/w2oc4thvox7s/73676/history

Seems to be testing from just one location, as far as I can tell?

Randomly, packets time out on the internet, I would take this random dashboard with a grain of salt, we cannot be sure SO had a outage just because one request happen to fail.

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