Comment by banditaras | Hacker News Reader

Comment by banditaras | Hacker News Reader

"Joel boasts that for 1/10 the hardware they have performance comparable to similarly size sites. He wonders if these other sites have good programmers. Let's see how they did it and you be the judge."

Let me be the judge then. For a site serving 13 million pageviews per month (80% of them are uncachable searches) we use 2 servers with about the same configuration (same memory, cpus). The database server has an average load of 1 and the application server (that is serving a bunch of other sites as well) is under 2 most of the day.

We have 1/2 of their capacity running an equally heavy site (all sites running on those servers make up 16-18 million pageviews per month). So if they run on 1/10 of similar sites, we run on 1/2 of their 1/10. Even better we pay 100% percent less of what they are paying. I wonder how smart Atwood is.

I don't intend to be a smart ass here. I would never say "Hey we run with 1/10 of your capacity, you are stupid" because performance heavily depends on the application. StackOverflow probably has a 90% cache hit ratio (86% of visitors are from google that land on some question asked some days or months ago). So 3 servers for a cache and forget site (logins and bits for pages that change often can be cached too) serving 16M pageviews per month is below average. They maybe doing a whole lot of other things in the backend that we don't know of , but the same goes for the other sites that "their programmers are stupid and use 10x hardware."

I would expect them to say what problems they solved and how instead of bragging about how awesome programmers they (he?) are.

I never asserted we have better performance because we have great programmers (although we do). I have stated that there is a performance benefit to using the Microsoft Stack relative to other common platforms like PHP, because C# just performs way better than PHP. And I've stated that the savings you get from the small number of servers we require relative to a typical PHP site more than pays the Microsoft licenses.

Why pay the Microsoft licenses when you could have Java or Scala serve the site?

Sure, but does that hold up when compared to a setup using something that sucks a little bit less than PHP?

I, on the other hand,

  do indent to be a smart ass.

lol s/indent/intent/g

Let me add to our happy collaborative spell checking exercise: It's supposed to be "intend" I believe ;-)

Sorry to do this, but I felt I have to explain the joke, what that guy meant was indent itself, that's why the line he wrote came like code,

  like this

that was his joke :) and sorry for ruining anyone's aha! moment.

A quick stylistical advice for you: calling someone you don't like or respect by his or her surname is just not very good manners and not very good style. If you want to express your antipathy in writing regarding the person you're writing about, call him Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jameson and not Smith and Jameson - everyone will understand your feelings but you will still give them basic courtesy and respect, which, in turn, will make your readers take your writing more seriously.

I read it the other way around. Calling somebody that you're not acquainted with by their last name in writing is pretty standard practice, and doesn't carry any connotations (at least to me). On the other hand, using a title like Mr. or Mrs., especially when your tone is negative, makes you sound like a prick. It's like saying "With all due respect, my good sir, you are incorrect".

Obviously, YMMV.

Dunno, I like the advice of what I think is one of the most reasonable contemporary English style guides, The Economist Style Guide: http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=...

I like the Economist's style as well, mainly because it rings of old intelligence. But they have a large, overarching identity backing them, while as individuals most (usually) don't. Similarly, they publish in a formal medium, which Hacker News is not.

The funny thing is that I like the guy. I like both of them. I don't think that they are great hackers, but I enjoy reading their blogs and I respect their efforts.

I also believe that StackOverflow is great. I tried contributing but almost always someone hits submit before I do so I gave up until I have more free time.

Sorry for not being politically correct, I thought this was HN.

Fair enough, I misunderstood what you meant then. I still don't think that using surnames only is a very nice thing, but maybe it's just me.

AFAIK, Joel is not the 'Atwood' of the two.

Joel is referring to his programmer(s) and I think Atwood is coding for StackOverflow

"StackOverflow probably has a 90% cache hit ratio (86% of visitors are from google that land on some question asked some days or months ago)."

For a fair analysis, you need to consider that people keep adding answers and comments to questions, specially if it is covering an interesting question or technology. (And what happens to the cache then?)

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