Stack Overflow Scalability
Stack Overflow still uses Microsoft products. Microsoft infrastructure works and is cheap enough, so there’s no compelling reason to change. Yet SO is pragmatic. They use Linux where it makes sense. There’s no purity push to make everything Linux or keep everything Microsoft. That wouldn’t be efficient.
Stack Overflow still uses a scale-up strategy. No clouds in site. With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. The cloud would also slow them down, making it harder to optimize and troubleshoot system issues. Plus, SO doesn’t need a horizontal scaling strategy. Large peak loads, where scaling out makes sense, hasn’t been a problem because they’ve been quite successful at sizing their system correctly.
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Is 20 Gb massive overkill? You bet your ass it is, the active SQL servers average around 100-200 Mb out of that 20 Gb pipe. However, things like backups, rebuilds, etc. can completely saturate it due to how much memory and SSD storage is present, so it does serve a purpose.
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Go into the IL (assembly language of .Net). Some coding is in IL, not C#. Look at SQL query plans. Take memory dumps of the web servers to see what is actually going on. Discovered, for example, a split call generated 2GB of garbage.
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SO goes to great lengths to reduce garbage collection costs, skipping practices like TDD, avoiding layers of abstraction, and using static methods. While extreme, the result is highly performing code.
There are also some comments on Hacker News.
