What it takes to run Stack Overflow (opens in new tab)

(nickcraver.com)

36 pointsJonoW12y ago9 comments

9 comments

9 comments · 3 top-level

wil42112y ago· 5 in thread

I am interested to find out why they use MS products over something on linux combined with other open source options.

sklivvz197112y ago

Because it's good, cheap enough and really fast. We have no significant pressure to move away from it.

wil42112y ago

Thank you for responding!

jc4p12y ago

It's simply because that's the stack we know and can utilize the best. We do have some non-MS stack things running but the stack we use is the one we know how to optimize and manage the best.

JasonPunyon12y ago

Really it's because the three guys who started it knew that stack the best. The rest of us are just hangers on :)

wil42112y ago

Thank you for the response. Usually on HN you dont hear a lot about MS products, its nice to hear about something different especially in a positive light.

k__12y ago· 1 in thread

"Now that we know how Stack Overflow performs on its current hardware, next time we can see why we don’t run in the cloud."

inb4 "because we're running mainly on MS software"

;)

-- edit --

why the down-votes? I read about other websites, like POF, who run on MS software and their server-architecture is monolithic, too. The time I read about it, the page run on 2 big Xeon machines.

jc4p12y ago

I didn't downvote you but I would assume it's because your message seems like the beginning of a flamewar and is also poorly written (Reddit quality).

If you are actually interested, here's a report one of our sys admins did a couple years ago estimating how much it would cost to have us running on "the cloud" - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/73969/what-would-sta...

mathattack12y ago

I'd be interested to learn more about how they analyze the data too. Managing page requests on the web is very important. But they're also left with an enormous social graph of usage and expertise. I'd be interested in what their setup is for that.

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