5 ms·

That stackoverflow infra blog post is out of date. They use more than a single webserver now. For example: https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackex

by mcbain 5y ago

That stackoverflow infra blog post is out of date. They use more than a single webserver now. For example: https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance

andrewxdiamond 5y ago
Most importantly, SO is extremely read-heavy, write-lite, and cache-friendly. A similar “scale” e-commerce site would be significantly more load, have more dynamic data, and just be overall harder to run.
dijit 5y ago
Now they have 9. They still serve a lot more traffic than I do and I have hundreds of instances; thousands of containers.
- nightpool 5y ago
  You have thousands of containers? Physician, heal thyself.
  - folmar 5y ago
    Thousands is not a lot. If you do microservices and have 100 of them, 3 replicas of each for dev, qa and prod, you already are at 900.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I mean, at my last job I had thousands of physical machines too. Scale can depend on many things. Here's a couple of reasons why it can easily be thousands: 1) Cronjobs, CI jobs, ETL, FaaS are all systems that exist. What used to be a process is now a container. (one need only check the PID count on their local machine to know that this can be many quite easily). 2) Microservices; I'm a larger fan of fat "services" but doing actual micro services tends to leave you with a lot of containers running 3) Actual compute need. If my original hosting strategy was thousands of machines, well, I'm going to have thousands of containers, if not more.
    - nightpool 5y ago
      Sure, but the implied message of your comment that you were saying you could replace all of your instances and containers with just 9 machines, since StackOverflow "serves a lot more traffic than you do" (i.e. "has more actual compute need"). I think most reasonable engineers would say that "thousands" of containers would be a massive mistake to use for that size of task, even if few of them would go to the extent that Stack Overflow did of using only 9 machines.
Dave3of5 5y ago
Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint. It not that they do run on a single webserver it's that they can run on one.
- chasd00 5y ago
  > Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint. i don't remember who said it but a quote i really like is "it's not finished when there's nothing left to add, it's finished when there's nothing left to take away"
  - mark-r 5y ago
    It's commonly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and is a lot older than I thought, from 1935 and originally in French. https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38837/178351 https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38837/178351

by mcbain 5y ago

That stackoverflow infra blog post is out of date. They use more than a single webserver now. For example: https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance

andrewxdiamond 5y ago

Most importantly, SO is extremely read-heavy, write-lite, and cache-friendly. A similar “scale” e-commerce site would be significantly more load, have more dynamic data, and just be overall harder to run.

dijit 5y ago

Now they have 9. They still serve a lot more traffic than I do and I have hundreds of instances; thousands of containers.

nightpool 5y ago
You have thousands of containers? Physician, heal thyself.
- folmar 5y ago
  Thousands is not a lot. If you do microservices and have 100 of them, 3 replicas of each for dev, qa and prod, you already are at 900.
- dijit 5y ago
  I mean, at my last job I had thousands of physical machines too. Scale can depend on many things. Here's a couple of reasons why it can easily be thousands: 1) Cronjobs, CI jobs, ETL, FaaS are all systems that exist. What used to be a process is now a container. (one need only check the PID count on their local machine to know that this can be many quite easily). 2) Microservices; I'm a larger fan of fat "services" but doing actual micro services tends to leave you with a lot of containers running 3) Actual compute need. If my original hosting strategy was thousands of machines, well, I'm going to have thousands of containers, if not more.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    Sure, but the implied message of your comment that you were saying you could replace all of your instances and containers with just 9 machines, since StackOverflow "serves a lot more traffic than you do" (i.e. "has more actual compute need"). I think most reasonable engineers would say that "thousands" of containers would be a massive mistake to use for that size of task, even if few of them would go to the extent that Stack Overflow did of using only 9 machines.

Dave3of5 5y ago

Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint. It not that they do run on a single webserver it's that they can run on one.

chasd00 5y ago
> Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint. i don't remember who said it but a quote i really like is "it's not finished when there's nothing left to add, it's finished when there's nothing left to take away"
- mark-r 5y ago
  It's commonly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and is a lot older than I thought, from 1935 and originally in French. https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38837/178351 https://english.stackexchange.com/q/38837/178351