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Stack Overflow: The Architecture – 2016 Edition
- charlieegan3 11y agoWish more sites/companies/employees published this sort of information - really interesting stuff. Are there any other examples of big (largely) Windows stacks? Stack Exchange is the only one I've seen discussed.
- dijit 11y agoMost of the places that have highly scaled Windows infrastructure and highly fault tolerant architecture tend to be the kinds of places with very paranoid middle managers.. Source: I work at one.
- lobster_johnson 11y agoTodd Hoff's High Scalability [1] is a very nice blog to follow if you like this kind of information about real-world stacks. He's been writing it for years. (Caveat: It's a while since I followed it closely.) [1] http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/
- dikaiosune 11y agoStuff the Internet Says on Scalability is an excellent weekly article he does with plenty of great resources. Lots of stuff that's just reposted from HN, but also many pieces on real-world architectures that I never see on HN or /r/programming.
- marinabercea 11y agoNot at this level of detail, but in the event you don't know about the site, try http://stackshare.io/stacks http://stackshare.io/stacks . You can see the app stack for the included companies at the levels: Application & Data, Utilities, DevOps, Business Tools.
- HillRat 11y agoMatch.com and PoF come to mind -- Match on the very large infrastructure side, PoF more along the lines of "punching above its weight."
- UK-AL 11y agoThere tons of big .net stacks, you just don't here about them in the startup world. In the corporate world however....
- codeulike 11y agoThey have 11 IIS servers but interestingly he says this: What do we need to run Stack Overflow? That hasn’t changed much since 2013, but due to the optimizations and new hardware mentioned above, we’re down to needing only 1 web server. We have unintentionally tested this, successfully, a few times. To be clear: I’m saying it works. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. It’s fun though, every time.
- btown 11y agoI interpret this as: Page render latency probably degrades, but the site doesn't go down. Slower loads certainly have a monetary cost, making 11 machines worthwhile, but in a pinch at least they won't go fully offline if 10 die.
- dyladan 11y agoThat is quite the pinch
- seanp2k2 11y agoInteresting to consider how some companies doing much less work on their machines than SO need clusters of hundreds of servers, meanwhile they can serve the 57th site by global traffic (according to Alexa) from one physical machine . Sure there is other stuff backing that one, but the next time you hear someone talk about big clusters and hundreds or thousands of nodes, just take a moment to appreciate how much can be done with one rack of gear these days.
- jldugger 11y agoTo be fair, they cache the hell out of their content.
- Nick-Craver 11y agoWe don't really cache that much, for example: every post, comment, user, etc. on the page is pulled and rendered live. We output cache certain pages for 60 seconds for anonymous users, but it has almost no performance impact (I think it's a 4% hit rate?) Some things are cached, but each page render is very dynamic - more so than most I think? I don't have a great source of comparison for similar sites though.
- mschuster91 11y ago> Fun fact: some of those browsers have been open for over 18 months. We’re not sure why. Someone should go check if those developers are still alive. How is that actually possible to keep a single TCP/IP connection open over 18 months?!
- jewel 11y agoSomeone probably opened up a browser on a server to look something up and then left it running. With a static IP and battery backup, only a reboot is likely to take it down. The connection should be able to survive short outages due to a firewall restart or momentary problem upstream, especially if there's no NAT in between. I'm using SSH's ControlMaster in persistent mode on my desktop at work. The connections stay open for as long as the desktop is up, which can be months at a time.
- fweespeech 11y agoWeb crawler that investigates websockets.
- caleblloyd 11y ago"During peak, we have about 500,000 concurrent websocket connections open. That’s a lot of browsers. Fun fact: some of those browsers have been open for over 18 months. We’re not sure why. Someone should go check if those developers are still alive." It's impressive that SO held the connection open for 18 months! That's some seriously good uptime for a process that manages a TCP connection.
- paulftw 11y agoSo it's 125 million SQL queries or 6 million page loads per machine per day. It also seems like average query is 1.2ms - am I missing something?
- eleitl 11y agoWhy the Windows stack though?