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Comment by UVB-76 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else not quite expecting StackExchange to be using a Microsoft stack?

Joel worked at MS on office, Excel if I recall correctly. Jeff's blog is named for a feature from a book published by MS. I would be more surprised if it was MS free.

"I started my career at Microsoft, a little software company outside of Seattle, where I was a program manager on the Excel team. My area was “programmability” and most of what I worked on in those days was replacing the Excel macro language (XLMs) with Excel Basic, and providing an object-oriented interface to Excel. Excel Basic became Visual Basic for Applications and the OO interface is what you know as OLE Automation, a.k.a. IDispatch."

-- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html

You mean to tell me Joel is partially responsible for the abomination known as Excel 2007 where I can't pull-drag the damn window from screen to screen (but all of the other Office 2007 products do!)

WIN+SHIFT+ArrowKey

He seems to have left Microsoft in 1995, so no, not really.

Trello (by Joel's company) is OS agnostic (running on MongoDB and node.js). But from memory they did this to learn new tools.

It's a Microsoft/Linux hybrid. SQL Server on the backend, Linux for monitoring, Redis, HAProxy, etc.

They discussed it quite a bit on the podcasts. I found those a really great resource since Jeff and Joel were discussing the website as they were building it and "aired" the reasons for doing specific things.

This has nothing to do with Joel. The decision was from Jeff Attwood. Jeff was a c# veteran and MS stack was the easiest decision to come up with an MVP and the journey from there.

They simply decided to choose the best.

Anyone who knows Joel Spolsky would expect a MS stack :)

It's difficult to take pragmatic advice from someone who took the least pragmatic (and most expensive) route for a startup web company.

I'm not sure I agree. Pragmatic choices based on using what you know and not just choosing a toolset because everyone else is using it.

Why does everyone in Silicon Valley run with expensive Apple hardware when Linux can run on any CPU?

If you have extensive Microsoft experience and take advantage of something like BizSpark* (although one suspects with their connections they wouldn't have needed that) it's hard to see how it wouldn't be plenty pragmatic and inexpensive.

* Currently three years of free licenses, all software you download during that time is free forever, and discounted MSDN subs thereafter.

Programmer time is a factor that comes into play when you build something and re-training your people to use a stack they are not familiar with + the associated mistakes can get expensive in a hurry.

If you happen to be familiar with the MS stack and are able to factor the license fees into your business plan there is no strong reason against and many for using that particular stack.

MS programmers tend to be a bit more expensive than people working with one of the many Linux offerings but that's not such a huge difference that it would become the deciding factor and if anything the MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware (and I write that as an anti-MS guy, I strongly believe that politics and tech should be kept separate when it comes to discussing systems relative to each other).

So even if there are lots of reasons why I would not have made that particular choice I can completely understand why the SO people made their choice the other way.

> the MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware

This is provably not true.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_use...

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/al...

There is a good reason majority of the World-Wide-Web is run on 'Nix stacks -- and there is a good reason majority of servers in general are 'Nix stacks. Also, an overwhelming percentage of super-computers (I know we are talking about webservers, but it illustrates performance capabilities) are running a 'Nix stack.

There is also cost involved, as well as flexibility of the stack. With a 'Nix stack, it's infinitely flexible, not so much the case with a Microsoft stack. Also the default MS Stack comes with a lot of additional OS overhead that is not present in the 'Nix stack, which reduces any said box's scalability.

Without trying to turn this into some sort of flame war - I was merely trying to suggest that the MS stack was not/is not the best choice for a highly scalable website. Take the top 10 websites -- they all run on 'Nix. The top cloud providers (except MS Azure), all 'Nix. These are companies that can easily afford MS licensing, so that's not part of the equation.

A MS stack at this scale is unusual to say the least.

That's not to say it won't scale (as evidenced by the SE team), but it doesn't mean there isn't a better alternative that saves more money and scales better with less hardware, etc.

It will be very hard to get into a flamewar with me supporting the Microsoft side of things. That said, none of the links you posted prove anything regarding performance, they do prove something about total cost of ownership, which once you factor everything in leans towards Linux for most installations, however, just looking at the situation for SO seems to me to suggest that they were more comfortable doing the initial development on the stack they were most familiar with and when the license costs started to count against them they used Linux machines to scale out.

Which is a pretty smart decision. Whether an MS stack at this scale is unusual does not say anything at all about whether or not it performs well.

I think we agree for the SE team, given the founders were MS stack familiar, it makes sense.

However, I have to disagree on your assertion the 'Nix's are less performant than the MS stack. The top tier web companies are not running 'Nix because TCO is lower; for most of these companies licensing costs are negligible and if it helped to scale better, it may even save them money going with MS stack... but they don't go with a MS stack...

Sometimes a RHEL license can even cost more than a MS license. Couple that with an Oracle DB back-end, and you easily have a much more costly setup than the MS equivalent. It's not about the money.

These companies are choosing the 'Nix stack because it is performing in an entirely different level than the MS stack. Everything from tiny embedded systems with 64k ram, up to monster systems with TB's of ram.

> "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why." http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74

> MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware

Could you please provide some evidence to support that?

Without breaking any promises to others here is an article with conclusions quite similar to mine:

http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2011/11/what...

Keep in mind that it hardly ever is the webserver that is the bottle neck.

My theory on why this is the case is very simple: MS can afford to throw vast amounts of money at optimizations that are next to impossible in Linux simply because the coupling between the layers in Linux is looser. And that's a good thing, it translates into better security and fewer bugs.

As always, optimization alone is not a reason enough to go down a certain path. But for raw speed on requests it's fairly hard to beat IIS, if that's what you're after (I'm usually not, and even when it matters I can comfortably saturate most outbound links from a single server doing light processing, and as soon as the processing becomes the bottle-neck the CPU cache size, RAM and so on matter more than your OS, but given identical hardware a 'dirty' approach should yield better results at a cost of unreliability/complexity).

Tight coupling and money are a good arguments, thanks. However, i believe we are comparing apples to oranges here. IIS uses it's own kernel module, HTTP.SYS - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer20... So, looks like having specific kernel api optimized for your particular usecase is an advantage, which IIS has and others don't.

It turns out there are kernel-mode webservers (or there were, at least), which seriously outperform user-mode ones. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/full_papers/jo... (page 11; article is old, but anyway)

I think you're forgetting BizSpark here, which we were in: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

IMO, it has one of the best tooling sets of any platform out there (Visual Studio) which saves lots of programmer time and increases productivity. With BizSpark the initial cost argument is out...so how's that not pragmatic?

I'm biased of course, but I think it worked out pretty well.

Nick Craver - Stack Exchange Sysadmin & Developer

How in this scenario is the MS stack the "least pragmatic" route?

prag·mat·ic adjective \prag-ˈma-tik\

: dealing with the problems that exist in a specific situation in a reasonable and logical way instead of depending on ideas and theories

I might be a bit late to the party, but if anyone is interested in copying the Stack Overflow setup, we're offering startups free software, 60k in Azure credits for accelerator-backed companies and engineering mentoring, if required. Find me at felixrieseberg.com or felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com and I can set you up.

Jeff Atwood hacked prototype and next several versions, and since he's a .net guy (and ruby guy now), that's why .net was picked. Lot about tech stack planning can be heard in first few SO podcasts, don't even know if there're still available online somewhere

I haven't listened to these yet, but I think this is what you are referring to:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/04/podcast-1/

No. Why not?

One must wonder, how much better this setup would of scaled had it been a more appropriate webserver stack such as Linux/BSD + Apache/Nginx or similar. Perhaps less boxes would be needed, or with the same number of boxes, more concurrent users.

> Microsoft infrastructure works and is cheap enough

not as cheap as just paying your team to maintain the boxes. I wonder how many times in the past few years SE has needed to call Microsoft for support? Would a RHEL license still be cheaper (probably)? If something like CentOS then there would be no support cost unless you need to bring in an outside contractor (for a particularly nasty issue).

> One must wonder, how much better this setup would of scaled had it been a more appropriate webserver stack such as Linux/BSD + Apache/Nginx or similar.

Why is the Microsoft stack not appropriate? I am not aware of any spectacular performance difference between Apache and IIS, or Windows Server 2012 and Linux, and clearly the SO team is not religiously Microsoft, so it's hard to see why they wouldn't have switched if it was a clear win. MSSQL is actually, in my experience coming from MySQL, amazing - I'm back on MySQL and Postgres now and I often wish I wasn't. I'd say it's the most underrated of MS's products, probably because of the expense of the Enterprise/Datacenter editions.

> One must wonder, how much better this setup would of scaled had it been a more appropriate webserver stack such as Linux/BSD + Apache/Nginx or similar

I guess you're gonna have to define "more appropriate" for me, I have a feeling we'll have a fundamental disagreement there. We could (and have) run the entirety of our peak load with 1 SQL server and 2 web servers (and not pegging them). Don't forget we run with a crazy amount of headroom at all times, by design. I'm not sure how much better you picture that scaling on a linux environment.

> not as cheap as just paying your team to maintain the boxes

That makes a lot of assumptions about the team, their expertise, and what support issues would arise.

> I wonder how many times in the past few years SE has needed to call Microsoft for support

In the past 4 years I've been here? Twice. Both to report bugs in CTP versions of SQL server. At no cost, and we improved SQL server as a result of being testers. We have a very good relationship with Microsoft and talk to the developers that make the tools and platform we use in order to make life better for both of us. We do the same thing for redis, Elasticsearch, etc. It's the same reason we open source almost all of the tools we make.

> If something like CentOS then there would be no support cost unless you need to bring in an outside contractor (for a particularly nasty issue)

We use CentOS for all our linux systems and are deploying new servers on CentOS 7 now. We'll me migrating the others in the coming months. That doesn't mean it's free. Developer or sysadmin time to control Puppet deployments and such still eat some factor of time.

Nick Craver - Stack Exchange Sysadmin & Developer

Where I come from, it is considered bad engineering to build a product that can only run on a single platform, can only run on one particular OS, and the product is at the mercy of future decisions by a 3rd party. We go out of our way to ensure we are not dependent on any single thing.

Even if it was the best choice at the time to go the Microsoft route, it may not be in the future... however -- SE has zero choice now otherwise they'd have to re-write their entire product... that sucks as a business because you have little choice over your own product now.

>Where I come from, it is considered bad engineering to build a product that can only run on a single platform, can only run on one particular OS, and the product is at the mercy of future decisions by a 3rd party.

This seems like a bit of a waste of resources to try and run an internal bespoke application on every platform imaginable. Now, if you are developing a product that you are then going to sell to other people to run on their own hardware this make more sense.

There are some very big benefits to writing to a specific platform, especially in the performance space.

In the end of the day it is a trade off between trying to eliminate every 3rd party dependency (next to impossible) or picking a solution or company you think will be around for a long time, and forging strong relationships with them.

We regularly talk to people at Microsoft (and all of the people who create and build to tools we use), give them feedback, and get bugs fixed. There is very little that comes down the pipe from them that we are not away of ahead of time and in some cases have helped shape through early access programs.

> SE has zero choice now otherwise they'd have to re-write their entire product...

This is not true at all, we have choices if MS decided to blow everything up. Not great choices, but we have them. Choosing between two or three crap options does not mean that options do not exist.

-George (SE Sysadmin)

When you encounter people who don't respect your judgement as much as they "should", I'd suggest it may be because "how well it scales" doesn't guarantee "appropriateness". In most real world situations, the specifics of the chosen stack are rather inconsequential - both MS and *nix stacks perform more than adequately. In my opinion, it is unwise to take the advice of zealots who refuse to acknowledge this reality.

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