3 ms·
The scale of the problem does not seem all that difficult to overcome (as indicated by the author). What I am interested / pleased to read is that a fairly popu
by bsg75 15y ago
The scale of the problem does not seem all that difficult to overcome (as indicated by the author). What I am interested / pleased to read is that a fairly popular, high traffic site is backed by a "plain old" RDBMS. MSSQL even.
- kijin 15y agoStack Ovderflow does use Redis, though last time I checked they said it was only for caching.
- jacques_chester 15y agoSQL Server is actually fairly well regarded as a platform these days. It's a "grown up" database; not quite as trusted for very large sites as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Teradata etc; but definitely capable of solid "midrange" performance with the usual Microsoft abundance of features and tool support. I think that what's happening here, really, is the emergence of SSDs as a server platform standard. SSDs drastically revise the algo-economics of data storage. From the mid-90s until now, demand for structured data storage has surged, apparently exponentially (though realistically, such a function would eventually be sigmoidal). So dramatic has this surge been that it overwhelmed the somewhat linear rate of I/O performance improvement for disk drives. Meanwhile, Moore's Law has more or less held and so in-memory architectures have become much more popular, starting with memcache. But SSDs change the equation, because they too can track Moore's Law. So they can take mature disk-bound technologies like RDBMSes and breathe new life into them. And that's exactly what's happening. At the turn of the millenium, if you were given StackOverflow levels of traffic and everything from 2011 technology except for SSDs, you'd have to spend dozens of times as much to approach the same level of performance.
- zbrock 15y agoDo you know of any high traffic sites that aren't?