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Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

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Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#51

Post by JonoW »

lmm wrote: post #50
Nick-Craver wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people behind Stack Overflow are still here...and we haven't changed our stack and are quite happy with the performance we get...and there's always more to squeeze out. We can and sometimes do run Stack Overflow (currently 3.3 billions hit a month) from 2 web servers and 1 SQL server...I think that's pretty good for any stack.

Performance isn't the reason I see people wanting to move away from that stack; it's more about library availability, tool ecosystem (including things like monitoring, so this is an improvement - though I doubt it will stem the tide), and language productivity. (Not that that your performance sounds like a compelling advantage for that stack. That's what, an average of 700 requests/second/web server? So the peak is p…

It can't top a table it's not in...

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#52

Post by edraferi »

spion wrote: post #47
stevepotter wrote: post #29

The anti .net kneejerk reactions on HN really disturbs me. You spend all day on stackoverflow then blindly bash their tech stack. Developing, deploying, and hosting .net apps is just fine. Many brilliant people choose .net and are plenty happy with it. Maybe rather than jumping to conclusions, you could give it a shot.

A problem with the Windows tech stack is the culture of automation (or lack thereof). Sure there is PowerShell, but often times critical tools insist on giving you a GUI instead of providing something that can be incorporated into a script. And even when they do offer scriptability, its much less documented than the GUI.

This was a revelation to me when I first started working with Linux. Because you work on the command line all the time, it's relatively straightforward to write shell scripts to do repeated tasks for you (good shell scripts of course, is another matter). Within the Windows environment it's much more difficult to switch between interactive and scripted modes.

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#53

Post by Nick-Craver »

lmm wrote: post #50
Nick-Craver wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people behind Stack Overflow are still here...and we haven't changed our stack and are quite happy with the performance we get...and there's always more to squeeze out. We can and sometimes do run Stack Overflow (currently 3.3 billions hit a month) from 2 web servers and 1 SQL server...I think that's pretty good for any stack.

Performance isn't the reason I see people wanting to move away from that stack; it's more about library availability, tool ecosystem (including things like monitoring, so this is an improvement - though I doubt it will stem the tide), and language productivity. (Not that that your performance sounds like a compelling advantage for that stack. That's what, an average of 700 requests/second/web server? So the peak is p…

First that chart's for linux systems...so it's not totally surprising to me that .Net isn't on it.

You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. Also, we're rendering quite a bit of dynamic data when rendering each page in We render every request we get in a very speedy manner, usually with 90% headroom and utilizing only 1 DB server (also at only 10-15% utilization)...we're pretty happy with that.

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#54

Post by Nick-Craver »

spion wrote: post #47
stevepotter wrote: post #29

The anti .net kneejerk reactions on HN really disturbs me. You spend all day on stackoverflow then blindly bash their tech stack. Developing, deploying, and hosting .net apps is just fine. Many brilliant people choose .net and are plenty happy with it. Maybe rather than jumping to conclusions, you could give it a shot.

A problem with the Windows tech stack is the culture of automation (or lack thereof). Sure there is PowerShell, but often times critical tools insist on giving you a GUI instead of providing something that can be incorporated into a script. And even when they do offer scriptability, its much less documented than the GUI.

There is Desired State Configuration (DSC) in Windows 2012+ (native in 2012 R2+), we are using it here at Stack Exchange and just deployed an entire data center via DSC. I highly suggest checking it out...think puppet on windows without ruby and with powershell. It is v1 and providers for smaller stuff are still coming, but we're already open sourcing the modules we're creating as we go: https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/DSC

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#55

Post by lmm »

Nick-Craver wrote: post #53
lmm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance isn't the reason I see people wanting to move away from that stack; it's more about library availability, tool ecosystem (including things like monitoring, so this is an improvement - though I doubt it will stem the tide), and language productivity. (Not that that your performance sounds like a compelling advantage for that stack. That's what, an average of 700 requests/second/web server? So the peak is p…

First that chart's for linux systems...so it's not totally surprising to me that .Net isn't on it. You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. Also, we're rendering quite a bit of dynamic data when rendering each page in We render every request we get in a very speedy manner, usually with 90% headroom and utiliz…

> You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers.

So you've premature-optimized for performance far past the point where you gained anything from it?

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with your performance, but if the best thing you can say about your platform is "it has adequate performance" then, well, it's not a very compelling platform.

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#56

Post by Nick-Craver »

lmm wrote: post #55
Nick-Craver wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First that chart's for linux systems...so it's not totally surprising to me that .Net isn't on it. You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. Also, we're rendering quite a bit of dynamic data when rendering each page in We render every request we get in a very speedy manner, usually with 90% headroom and utiliz…

> You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. So you've premature-optimized for performance far past the point where you gained anything from it? I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with your performance, but if the best thing you can say about your platform is "it has adequate performance" then, well, it's no…

Not at all, we did the performance optimizations to make page loads faster for our users...the side effect is less load on our servers.

It's an awesome platform for us and we love it...you should choose whatever platform works for you.

Re: Stack Exchange's monitoring system is now open source

#57

Post by profquail »

Nick-Craver wrote: post #53
lmm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance isn't the reason I see people wanting to move away from that stack; it's more about library availability, tool ecosystem (including things like monitoring, so this is an improvement - though I doubt it will stem the tide), and language productivity. (Not that that your performance sounds like a compelling advantage for that stack. That's what, an average of 700 requests/second/web server? So the peak is p…

First that chart's for linux systems...so it's not totally surprising to me that .Net isn't on it. You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. Also, we're rendering quite a bit of dynamic data when rendering each page in We render every request we get in a very speedy manner, usually with 90% headroom and utiliz…

C# is on that chart -- just Ctrl+F and search for 'mono'.

If you select the 'Win' hardware tab near the top of the page, you'll be able to see figures for Windows as well: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=wi...

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