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Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

My last job served around 30-40 million pages a month on 4 servers that used ASP.Net and SQL Server 2000. The only server whose CPU utilization was over 20% was the database server. I'm not sure the CPU utilization on the web servers ever went above 10%.

A friend of mine's company has a tough time keeping up with 500,000 page views a month using more equipment. They're using PHP and MySQL.

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Apple and Oranges comparison really.

- What do the sites do?

- How optimised are they?

- How much static/cachable content is there?

Really there is too little data for this comparison.

Both are simple sites by any definition. The database queries for almost all the pages views are clustered index seeks (on SQL server) and in MySQL they are mostly looking up on the primary keys for the tables used (these are MyISAM tables so no clustered indexes here).

Both are equally unoptimized outside of the database queries which I believe are fairly well optimized.

No real cacheble content on either outside of the usual suspects (JS, CSS, some images)

And Michael Schumacher with a compact can beat you on a sports car.

Not in a drag race where he's driving a Yugo and you're driving a Ford GT. Unless you crash of course.

What types of servers in terms of CPU cores and RAM? Microsoft's licensing structure makes it much cheaper to scale up instead of scaling out.

I serve around 50 million requests a day using 4 servers on a system built using PHP and MySQL on one of my services.

Requests/Pages per server is a bad metric to determine efficiency when every persons problems are so different.

If your utilization is so low why do you have the additional servers?

This is meaningless without the necessary information to evaluate the situations.

Apples and orangoutangs.

So, do you get free coffee in the cantina at Microsoft?

I'm not sure what you are suggesting?

Free coffee would be enough to get me to say something nice about Microsoft products?

I work at Microsoft?

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