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> Everytime you go to SO, it hits one of these 9 web servers and all data on SO sits on those 2 massive SQL servers. That's pretty amazing. I don't find it ama

by ablekh 6y ago

> Everytime you go to SO, it hits one of these 9 web servers and all data on SO sits on those 2 massive SQL servers. That's pretty amazing. I don't find it amazing at all. Functionality-wise, StackOverflow is a very simple Web application. Moreover, SO's range of 300-500 requests per second is not a mind-blowing load. Even in 2014, a powerful enough single physical server (running a Java application) was able to handle 1M requests per second[1]. A bit later, in 2017, similar performance has been demonstrated on a single AWS EC2 instance, using Python (and a blazingly-fast HTTP-focused micro-framework Japronto), which is typically not considered a high-performance option for Web applications[2]. [1] https://www.techempower.com/blog/2014/03/04/one-million-http-rps-without-load-balancing-is-easy https://www.techempower.com/blog/2014/03/04/one-million-http... [2] https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/million-requests-per-second-with-python-95c137af319 https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/million-requests-per-secon...

silvestrov 6y ago
The amaziness is that the leadership allows it to be simple. This is such a great competitive advantage. Compare this to a leadership that thinks you absolutely must use Akamai for your 50 req/secs webserver. You end up with tons of complexity for no reason.
- ablekh 6y ago
  Fair enough. Though not too surprising still, considering the original leadership of the company, one of whom (Joel Spolsky) is still on the board of directors. Having said that, the board's 5:4 VC-to-non-VC ratio looks pretty scary to me. But this is a different story ...
mtberatwork 6y ago
SO is a bit more complicated than returning a single character in a response. You can achieve high throughput with just about anything these days if you aren't doing any "work" on the server. 300-500 reqs/second is impressive for a web site/application with real-world traffic.

by ablekh 6y ago

silvestrov 6y ago

The amaziness is that the leadership allows it to be simple. This is such a great competitive advantage. Compare this to a leadership that thinks you absolutely must use Akamai for your 50 req/secs webserver. You end up with tons of complexity for no reason.

ablekh 6y ago
Fair enough. Though not too surprising still, considering the original leadership of the company, one of whom (Joel Spolsky) is still on the board of directors. Having said that, the board's 5:4 VC-to-non-VC ratio looks pretty scary to me. But this is a different story ...

mtberatwork 6y ago

SO is a bit more complicated than returning a single character in a response. You can achieve high throughput with just about anything these days if you aren't doing any "work" on the server. 300-500 reqs/second is impressive for a web site/application with real-world traffic.