4 ms·

The guy behind PlentyOfFish (the dating site) has written similar things in the past. Various links and tech info: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-archi

The guy behind PlentyOfFish (the dating site) has written similar things in the past. Various links and tech info: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily, making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). Becoming a member of their "BizSpark" program literally provides you with all the software free of charge. Entering BizSpark is easy and costs nothing. If you can get in, of course, which is far from certain. My company seemed to fit the criteria well a couple of years ago but was rejected without explanation. Of course, now we are profitable enough to afford any software we want but have stuck to open source as, well.. that's what we built our stack on instead ;-)

giulianob 13y ago
I got into it with my game company but once you graduate, then you need to start paying up. Maybe it only cost him a couple hundred bucks a month now but once he needs to pay for the licenses then that's when he can judge if it's really worth it. Until then, he's just getting stuff for free and saying how great it is.
- merlincorey 13y ago
  What if... the linked blog post is worth 1 extra year of free licenses and was commissioned by Microsoft PR.
lazyjones 13y ago
Don't forget StackOverflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-architecture.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch... - apart from the somewhat unbelievable PlentyOffish project, it's the only prestige project based on MS software most people will recall. In their 2011 update, they claimed to be using "a lot more Linux machines", because apparently it's fun to develop using Microsoft technology, but for some infrastructure components (proxying, Nagios...), there's no way to beat Linux even if you're a MS fanboy. ;-)
- adventured 13y ago
  Plenty Of Fish shouldn't be considered unbelievable. I've been following information about their infrastructure from the first moment they posted about it. There's nothing unbelievable about it at all. Over the years he has openly described changes to the site's setup as they've scaled, and it makes fine sense. Stack isn't the only prestige product. Nearly all of Microsoft's infrastructure runs on their own dog food. That's a lot bigger of a product than Stack Exchange is.
  - anoymous9352 13y ago
    Azure offering support for Linux shows how much faith Microsoft have in their own crap.
TheAnimus 13y ago
>It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily, making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). This is the thing, I've regularly scaled MS, almost RAD tool technologies to multi-thousand request per second scenarios. Normally for in house things, so I've had the benefit of warning for demand. But it gives me the nicety of fast to dev tools, the fact maintaining C# code is almost pleasurable at times, with good performance. Sure some custom C in Linux kernel land system will be faster, but the price performance is really good. Comparing MVC 4 to Ruby on Rails and Django for a new project, the performance of MVC4 was an order of magnitude better under load. But at the last HN meetup I went to in London they were taking an informal survey of languages. Despite having Erland and Lisp mentioned, the hosts didn't ask about C# or F#, despite my knowledge of at least 10 people there heavily in to it, I'd have guessed at least 30 people must have been. You also get some bizarre comments, a friend of mine who spends most of his time in just one nameless language, half ask/told some people that Asp.Net doesn't scale... Some people have a religious zeal against it I think. Which is a shame, C# is a great language, and if people want to 'stick it to MS' go contribute on mono instead of bitching about MS!

giulianob 13y ago

I got into it with my game company but once you graduate, then you need to start paying up. Maybe it only cost him a couple hundred bucks a month now but once he needs to pay for the licenses then that's when he can judge if it's really worth it. Until then, he's just getting stuff for free and saying how great it is.

merlincorey 13y ago
What if... the linked blog post is worth 1 extra year of free licenses and was commissioned by Microsoft PR.

lazyjones 13y ago

Don't forget StackOverflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-architecture.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch... - apart from the somewhat unbelievable PlentyOffish project, it's the only prestige project based on MS software most people will recall. In their 2011 update, they claimed to be using "a lot more Linux machines", because apparently it's fun to develop using Microsoft technology, but for some infrastructure components (proxying, Nagios...), there's no way to beat Linux even if you're a MS fanboy. ;-)

adventured 13y ago
Plenty Of Fish shouldn't be considered unbelievable. I've been following information about their infrastructure from the first moment they posted about it. There's nothing unbelievable about it at all. Over the years he has openly described changes to the site's setup as they've scaled, and it makes fine sense. Stack isn't the only prestige product. Nearly all of Microsoft's infrastructure runs on their own dog food. That's a lot bigger of a product than Stack Exchange is.
- anoymous9352 13y ago
  Azure offering support for Linux shows how much faith Microsoft have in their own crap.

TheAnimus 13y ago

>It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily, making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). This is the thing, I've regularly scaled MS, almost RAD tool technologies to multi-thousand request per second scenarios. Normally for in house things, so I've had the benefit of warning for demand. But it gives me the nicety of fast to dev tools, the fact maintaining C# code is almost pleasurable at times, with good performance. Sure some custom C in Linux kernel land system will be faster, but the price performance is really good. Comparing MVC 4 to Ruby on Rails and Django for a new project, the performance of MVC4 was an order of magnitude better under load. But at the last HN meetup I went to in London they were taking an informal survey of languages. Despite having Erland and Lisp mentioned, the hosts didn't ask about C# or F#, despite my knowledge of at least 10 people there heavily in to it, I'd have guessed at least 30 people must have been. You also get some bizarre comments, a friend of mine who spends most of his time in just one nameless language, half ask/told some people that Asp.Net doesn't scale... Some people have a religious zeal against it I think. Which is a shame, C# is a great language, and if people want to 'stick it to MS' go contribute on mono instead of bitching about MS!