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Comment by sajidnizami | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow's architecture these days is not just Microsoft stack. They are using Redis and whole load of other OSS tech to get things working. Here it is interesting to note that this is what they started with: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... and this is what they are currently using http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind. It is difficult to get Cache frameworks and other infrastructure working with MS Stack if you got a high performance website.

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not just Microsoft stack

The Microsoft stack is not always just a Microsoft stack any more. e.g. it has jQuery out of the box. Of course you mix and match when you get to the high end. The idea of the MS-only shop is not as true as it used to be, many people are more pragmatic.

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind

Why, because MS didn't supply every single piece of server infrastructure software that So use, just the main ones? That's an odd definition of "lagging".

MS have a distributed cache called "Windows Server AppFabric" (formerly "velocity"). I don't know that much about it.

I remember Velocity and articles on it initially. Thanks for the help. I am looking up AppFabric now.

See I prefer sticking with one flavor of tools because its easier for developers to adjust. TBH MS does supply almost everything from grounds up. I only had to look elsewhere for advanced distributed caching frameworks. In fact before switching to Amazon EC2 our old datacenter was running MS VMM and our stack still didn't have anything other than MS software.

MS does supply a product in each category, but most MS dev shops that I have seen will more often than not be using some of: svn instead of Tfs, nUnit instead of MStest, castle or ninject instead of unity, nHibernate instead of EF, etc. And targeting firefox/chrome with jQuery. As far as I know there's no clear leaders in the distributed cache niche, and there is a fair amount of interest in noSQL stores like mongo, couch and ravenDb.

Where the open source choice is more functional, cheaper or just more familiar, it often gets used instead. This is good.

It is difficult to get Cache frameworks and other infrastructure working with MS Stack if you got a high performance website.

How so?

All these new frameworks are designed to work with OSS tech. So lets say some better NoSQL platform comes out, it supports OSS technologies first. .Net comes later and sometimes it is difficult to decide which client library to pick to connect to the NoSQL service. OSS client libraries would mature early and .Net libraries would take a little time.

Connecting OSS tech and MS stack is getting easier but still leaves you with a lot of uncertainty.

This is an example: http://wiki.basho.com/Client-Libraries.html These guys have Erlang client but there is no support for .Net.

http://datarelay.codeplex.com/documentation

tbh if you are running .NET and SQL Server you don't really need a cache like redis or memcache since SQL Server has had an in-memory query cache built in for 12+ years now.

Thinking that would help is a mistake. Take it from someone who went to optimize SQL Server 2008 R2 to its limits.

Cache framework's are absolutely necessary. The whole idea is to avoid a SQL Server hit and return a cached data object in memory. I think Stackoverflow is the best case study here.

Same here. Considering what can be done with careful tuning of hardware and database structure, I can tell SQL Server's limits are very high, but nowhere near close to whatever MySpace needed.

SQL Server is the third best Microsoft product. Right after their natural keyboard and their mice lineup.

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