What it takes to run Stack Overflow

nickcraver.com

36 points·JonoW··9 comments

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

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.

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.

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

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

Thank you for responding!

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.

"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.

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...

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