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The Stack Exchange Architecture
- xtacy 15y agoCould someone clarify this: the post says that the servers are in _our_ Data Center in NY and OR. I have always thought that DCs host 100s to 100,000 machines! Is this a colo? EDIT: What is the typical network utilization for such web-services?
- gbeech 15y agoyes, we are in two colo's one in Oregon and one in NYC
- InclinedPlane 15y agoOne may comment about where they live by calling it "my apartment complex", for example, even though they merely rent a single unit rather than own the entire complex. I think that's the same verbal construction as here.
- barranger 15y agoInteresting to see one of these Architecture blog posts for a site running on the .Net framework. Does 9.5-10 Million hits a day make them the largest .Net backed site?
- smoyer 15y agoWindows + Ubuntu + CentOS ... I'm curious to know how the OS selection was made and specifically why the HAProxy servers are Ubuntu and the Redis servers are CentOS. Do your admins work on all three OSs?
- gbeech 15y agoIt's pretty simple, we started off on Ubuntu for our linux boxes. Then made a decision to move to CentOS for the stability and vendor package compatibility for our core services. However, We are going to stick with Ubuntu on some of our back end servers - management and utility servers for the larger package repositories. Our Core Q&A engine is written in C# with MS-SQL databases so obviously we need to run windows for that. There are only 2 sysadmins so yes we work on all OS's
- thwarted 15y agoAny good Linux admin should be able to work on any distribution... and will... as long as you allow them to complain about it.
- brugidou 15y agoWe do many more hits a day with IIS and .Net on windows. And we're far from the biggest.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoMind if I ask who 'we' is?
- braden_e 15y agoOther than microsoft themselves: myspace is still fairly huge but probably a mixed stack. Plentyoffish is up there too - http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jconley 15y agoI have also ran .NET backed stuff that was larger than this... It's not that uncommon. In my experience the guys running .NET backed stuff just aren't usually as vocal about things. ;) hi5 (the social network) also runs a lot of .NET and SQL Server nowadays. They're also running Windows Server: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000009394 http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?...
- michaelcampbell 15y agoA (large) previous company of mine used .NET for an internal operation which was a high volume database oriented application. Assuming it's still in use, I'm reasonably certain it did quite a lot more volume than that (orders of magnitude more), but it wasn't a website.
- mikerg87 15y agoI found it curious that there is so much hardware that is at around 20% utilization. Wouldn't it be better to have less hardware with higher utilization and buy cheaper/better hardware later if warranted?
- baddox 15y agoProbably, but considering the amount of bragging (not meant pejoratively) they've done about how cheap their hardware is considering their traffic, it's probably not a huge bank-breaking issue. Also, they could almost certainly be significantly more energy efficient with hardware running near 100% utilization.
- latch 15y agoWe wouldn't leave our cars on 80% of the time idling, but servers, well, why not? Every little bit helps guys.
- kitsune_ 15y agoRam is pretty cheap these days...
- jodrellblank 15y agoand less RAM is even cheaper. You don't address the point at all.
- mkup 15y agothe point is: traffic is 50x expensive compared to RAM
- jodrellblank 15y agoI don't understand what you are saying. The original comment is based on the assumption that less hardware would still easily support the same traffic level.
- brunnsbe 15y agoThis is a nice overview. The article mentions database pairs for the MSSQL servers. What high availability mode is used, database mirroring or cluster?
- DodgyEggplant 15y agoeverything: DB, Web servers etc aprox 600GB RAM
- Goladus 15y agoDo you have additional datacenter environments for staging and development?
- fleaflicker 15y agoFrom the end of the post: We backup our databases nightly and restore them to two different locations. One local to our NY data center for our devs to work against, and one remote in our OR data center.