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Comment by nopassrecover | Hacker News Reader

How is this a joke? The author has given a set of requirements and asked what you think are the best choices to meet those requirements. If you are ever considering a web startup this is a perfect question to ask and one you should know the answer to.

Incidentally I'm a fan of the ASP.NET MVC stack (using MS SQL) for web development, but I don't think it's the most scalable and is unlikely to have a large pool of good developers to source from (you would probably want a good C# or non-MS-hating RoR developer).

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Scalability shouldn't be a problem. Stack Overflow uses ASP.NET MVC with a SQL server backend, and they're doing over a million hits a day.

Yeah that is true and plentyoffish.com uses ASP.NET too. I'm just thinking like Amazon/Google/Facebook big and whether that would become an issue.

I'm just thinking like Amazon/Google/Facebook big and whether that would become an issue.

Yeah, why solve problems that you actually have when you can fantasize about solving problems you don't have instead?

Good point.

However, the whole topic of this thread is fantasising about the perfect stack for that massive site. Besides which, 30 seconds now could save one year in the future (just think if Netscape had thought ahead).

Myspace was originally written in Coldfusion, they ported to ASP.NET and the current system handles 1.5 Billion page views per day and up to 2.3 million concurrent users (source: MIX Conference 2006 http://www.andreas-kraus.net/blog/handling-15-billion-page-v...)

Thanks!

No offense but a million hits/day doesn't have much to do with scalability. That comes down to 11 hits/sec - a single midrange server will deal that without breaking a sweat.

Add one or two orders of magnitude, then you're talking about scalability.

In theory and on average, a million hits per day will come down to 11 hits per second. What you're more likely to see in practice though is huge peaks and troughs in load. The average might be 11 hits per second. But the peak load could be 100 hits per second around lunch and the minimum load could be 2 hits per second at 4 AM.

Moreover, a hit is a rather arbitrary unit of measure. 11 hits per second to the Twitter API is a lot different than 11 hits per second to a static site like example.com.

Yes, I ignored the bell curve due to the nature of the site - should have made that clear.

There's not much point even taking that into account for a read-only affair like SO at such a small scale because the cache is doing the work here and that won't sweat even under 100 or 500 reqs/sec.

Anyways, you point out correctly that discussing scaling-issues is rather fruitless without taking all variables into account. I was just trying to say that "SO (in particular) is handling 1mio reqs/day" does not tell much about the performance of the underlying stack.

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