> One must wonder, how much better this setup would of scaled had it been a more appropriate webserver stack such as Linux/BSD + Apache/Nginx or similar. Why i

> One must wonder, how much better this setup would of scaled had it been a more appropriate webserver stack such as Linux/BSD + Apache/Nginx or similar. Why is the Microsoft stack not appropriate? I am not aware of any spectacular performance difference between Apache and IIS, or Windows Server 2012 and Linux, and clearly the SO team is not religiously Microsoft, so it's hard to see why they wouldn't have switched if it was a clear win. MSSQL is actually, in my experience coming from MySQL, amazing - I'm back on MySQL and Postgres now and I often wish I wasn't. I'd say it's the most underrated of MS's products, probably because of the expense of the Enterprise/Datacenter editions.