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Comment by sajidnizami | Hacker News Reader

SO is the best case study of a startup scaling with .Net. Whenever I read their infrastructure stuff I cringe I am not in their team.

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My two take aways are, generally you can make anything scale, cache like hell, and I personally don't see enough value in .NET to justify the licensing costs to roll it out initially or the long term.

They are part of Bizspark program so they got free licenses. They don't even have much hardware.

Important part isn't caching. You can just create HTML copies off a page and serve them through a fast server, that is a very easy cache.

Difficult part is smart caching, cache getting updated when they need to be and persisted properly to the DB. These guys have nailed it in my opinion.

I often lookup these guys and optimize my own sites and have been following them since their beta phase.

One point on the cost issue. To an individual a Windows server license looks like a lot of money but to a business it really doesn't matter. Every server my company buys has many paying customers tied to it so it really doesn't matter to us at all.

The cost of the Windows OS itself it not the real cost. SQLServer gets costly as you grow out, but not nearly as bad as Oracle.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

Yes, BizSpark makes it free, but that basically locks you into the platform long enough for you to rely on it before you start paying those prices.

Besides the monetary cost, there's the opportunity cost of dealing with licenses in the first place. Part is compliance (Does your company have current licenses that cover every bit of software on every virtual machine on every developer laptop? Can you prove it?) and part is procurement (Do you get the plan with free upgrades, or do you buy new? Will you need enough licenses over the next two years that you should get a site-license or is it cheaper to stick with single user licenses?).

Correction: it doesn't matter for some workloads.

This old classic applies to business models as well as software: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

It's also a great case study of a hybrid model, where .Net application servers are complemented with open source components such as Redis and HAProxy.

Exactly.

Initially they weren't using anything OSS but moved to HAProxy and Redis. They even help update HAProxy from time to time.

http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/2669915777/powered-by-redis-...

No mention of the "L" word in this thread. Stack(Overflow|Exchange) is running Linux! (and windows of course).

I always thought that, at scale, SO and (Facebook or Twitter) were an apple to oranges comparison. Not because of load, but because of types of load.

For whatever reason, I have it in my head that the difficulty Facebook and Twitter (and even Digg) face in scaling are the social aspects of their sites. These are the things that require custom software (FlockDB and Cassandra) and a lot of machines.

Perhaps I need to use SO again, but in the day, this social aspect of SO didn't exist. This means their scaling challenges are far more traditional, say like slashdot. 99% cacheable reads type thing.

If I'm right, SO is really just a case study that, depending on what they are doing, some startups will be able to scale with .NET.

Scaling problems are not unique to .Net, you have them with Rails, PHP and even C++.

As long as you are able to measure where your bottlenecks are and address them you are fine.

I had a ball working on these performance issues and tuning down render times for question/show to 50ms (a totally dynamic page).

I guess not all developers get a kick out of the same things.

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