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Comment by stevepotter | Hacker News Reader

The anti .net kneejerk reactions on HN really disturbs me. You spend all day on stackoverflow then blindly bash their tech stack. Developing, deploying, and hosting .net apps is just fine. Many brilliant people choose .net and are plenty happy with it. Maybe rather than jumping to conclusions, you could give it a shot.

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Stack Overflow (which I avoid as much as I can fwiw) is not a strong argument for the .net stack given the people behind it have moved to a different stack for their next project (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html). That's not an isolated incident.

I've several friends working in that stack. While many defend it as the correct decision at the time (and I don't disagree with that), all would rather be using something else now.

Most of the people behind Stack Overflow are still here...and we haven't changed our stack and are quite happy with the performance we get...and there's always more to squeeze out.

We can and sometimes do run Stack Overflow (currently 3.3 billions hit a month) from 2 web servers and 1 SQL server...I think that's pretty good for any stack.

Performance isn't the reason I see people wanting to move away from that stack; it's more about library availability, tool ecosystem (including things like monitoring, so this is an improvement - though I doubt it will stem the tide), and language productivity.

(Not that that your performance sounds like a compelling advantage for that stack. That's what, an average of 700 requests/second/web server? So the peak is probably around 1500? Pretty good indeed, but not outstandingly so - where I worked 3 years ago our system handled peaks of 600 requests/second/web server on a JVM-based stack. And I don't see .net topping the charts on http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/).

It can't top a table it's not in...

First that chart's for linux systems...so it's not totally surprising to me that .Net isn't on it.

You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers. Also, we're rendering quite a bit of dynamic data when rendering each page in < 40ms (the average for a question page on Stack Overflow yesterday was 36ms).

We render every request we get in a very speedy manner, usually with 90% headroom and utilizing only 1 DB server (also at only 10-15% utilization)...we're pretty happy with that.

> You have to keep in mind we're ridiculously over-provisioned, we're handling that load while maintaining 10-15% utilization on 3 year old web servers.

So you've premature-optimized for performance far past the point where you gained anything from it?

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with your performance, but if the best thing you can say about your platform is "it has adequate performance" then, well, it's not a very compelling platform.

Not at all, we did the performance optimizations to make page loads faster for our users...the side effect is less load on our servers.

It's an awesome platform for us and we love it...you should choose whatever platform works for you.

C# is on that chart -- just Ctrl+F and search for 'mono'.

If you select the 'Win' hardware tab near the top of the page, you'll be able to see figures for Windows as well: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=wi...

What anti .net kneejerk? At time of this comment there are 28 comments, only 2 of which are anti .net / Microsoft (with no replies) and they are already well on their way to being downvoted into oblivion.

Many of us have .NET experience, really like C# but have sensible reasons for not recommending it. A Microsoft only stack is nowhere near as flexible as Linux and if you were to reach Stack Overflow's levels of traffic you'll not be able to avoid the need to run a part of your infrastructure on Linux. I seriously doubt Stack Overflow is running Redis, ElasticSearch & HAProxy* on Windows. Unless you already have a team proficient in .NET, there are few good reasons to use it instead of a JVM language.

*https://github.com/opserver/Opserver/tree/master/Opserver.Co...

I imagine the Stackoverflow guys are familiar with Linux architectures, they also run the open source forum Discourse[1] which is a Ruby on Rails app that comes with a recommendation to set up and develop in a *NIX environment[2].

Certainly the point is to use the right tool for the job, and I wouldn't dismiss your final comment: having a team proficient in .NET is a great reason to build your tools with/for that platform.

But no, I don't think it would be fair to reply to this article saying "Why didn't they build this for [my preferred language]?"

[1]: http://www.discourse.org/ [2]: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/discourse-as-your-first-ra...

Just because you use c# doesn't mean your whole stack needs to be Microsoft. No reason why you could have Windows web-servers running asp.net/c#, but have postgres DB, nginx, memcache etc on linux. Azure seems to be actually encouraging this.

The cost of windows licenses for web-servers is not that much. Avoiding SQL Server is the big win in reducing cost.

All true but there is still quite a bit of inefficiency involved if you need a team that is both proficient in deploying & running Linux infrastructure tools as well as Windows servers.

And given that this discussion is taking place in the comments section of a link to a custom-made monitoring dashboard that quite possibly wouldn't be needed* if SO was a Linux-only shop doesn't exactly devalue my previous statement.

*I have no idea whether this could be replaced with Nagios or Munin

I imagine that 99% of the users on here won't work on any projects that receive the same levels of traffic that Stack Overflow will get, and as such the worries of scaling to this level aren't really an issue.

For the vast majority of websites that developers will build, the .NET stack is absolutely fine. My only gripe with being a .NET developer is that if your professional experience is limited to a Windows based stack you may find it hard to move over to a Unix-based stack.

Indeed we run all of these things (and more) on linux. We use the most appropriate architecture we can come up with at the time. When a better overall option appears, we do that. New information and technology makes our decisions change, that's how brains are supposed to work, I think.

We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.

As Opserver grows we will be monitoring Windows and Linux with our solution, but simple to setup via polling, or more advanced monitoring via an agent (puppet and DSC configurable/installable). We plan to have agents for both Windows and Linux open sourced, both using a standard communication format so that anyone can write additional agents, or add to them, or...whatever really. We haven't started building this yet, a complete monitoring solution is what we'll be working on over the next 6-12 months. It will be in the open as we go, with lots of internal dogfooding to prove things out.

Maybe you're being over-sensitive as I don't see anything hostile to .NET. The closest I saw was the comment that reading C# seemed odd compared to most of today's start-ups (which you could probably say about Java as well).

EDIT: Somehow I had showdead off, and now see the "punched in the gut comment" ... the fact that it's dead shows that the community doesn't really put up with non-productive comments.

A problem with the Windows tech stack is the culture of automation (or lack thereof). Sure there is PowerShell, but often times critical tools insist on giving you a GUI instead of providing something that can be incorporated into a script. And even when they do offer scriptability, its much less documented than the GUI.

This was a revelation to me when I first started working with Linux. Because you work on the command line all the time, it's relatively straightforward to write shell scripts to do repeated tasks for you (good shell scripts of course, is another matter). Within the Windows environment it's much more difficult to switch between interactive and scripted modes.

There is Desired State Configuration (DSC) in Windows 2012+ (native in 2012 R2+), we are using it here at Stack Exchange and just deployed an entire data center via DSC. I highly suggest checking it out...think puppet on windows without ruby and with powershell. It is v1 and providers for smaller stuff are still coming, but we're already open sourcing the modules we're creating as we go: https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/DSC

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