• Kyle Brandt

  You can find that detail at http://blog.serverfault.com/post/1432571770/ , there have been some DB upgrades since that post however.

• Kyle Brandt

  Oops forgot about source control 🙂 Updated the post, it is Mercurial (and many use the kiln interface)

  • Guest

    Where is the “updated post”, I don’t see any mention of VCS in the above blog post. 😉

• Kyle Brandt

  Hi Darren,

  I actually ran into a problem with Ubuntu server where it would boot into ‘runlevel unknown’ which has made me a little wary of Ubuntu server (I was able to fix it, but the problem has been around for a few releases). For my monitoring and backup systems I really favor Ubuntu as it has a package for everything and I can install new tools easily without hunting for repositories or compiling the programs. For things like the router and HAProxy I will probably opt for CentOS going forward. However, I don’t feel so strongly about this that I felt the need to rebuild the haproxy servers. That reminds me, I totally forgot to mention our 3 bind DNS servers — time to update the post!

  • Charlie

    If you like Ubuntu’s ‘package for everything’, you might like Arch Linux. It’s a little lighter than Ubuntu, and everything in their repos is up-to-date.

    • RyanD

      for production, I’d rather stick with a widely accepted stable release than the newest version deemed stable by the package maintainer.

Pingback: Tweets that mention Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points - blog.serverfault.com -- Topsy.com()

• Nick Craver

  Yup, this is correct, we’re moving to MVC3 now (like right now, chat is already running on it).

• George Beech

  No we do not use a CDN. All static content is served off the sstatic.net domain hosted in our datacenters.

• Alex Kahn

  Every asset served and AJAX request is also an HTTP request. ‘Page views’ doesn’t include these types of requests.

  • Michael Haren

    But really, 96% of your hits are not actual pageviews?

    • Richard

      Hey Michael, you might wanna take a look at this: http://www.quantcast.com/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc Click on ‘month’ and select ‘impressions’ from the left select box

• Kyle Brandt

  Hi Michael,

  Each pageview is going to make multiple HTTP requests. These include requests to our cookie-less sstatic.net static content if that data has not been cached on the client as well things like Ajax requests and API requests. But yes, 800 req/s is the peak amount of requests (Actually a little higher). From a sysadmin perspective I am mostly interested in my peak figures as this is what we need to make sure we can handle.

  • Michael Haren

    Thanks for clarifying, Kyle. It’s clearly an impressive system–good work!

• Kyle West

  I’d like to know the answer to that too!

• Stack Exchange

  Yes, where it makes sense – in other places we’re using raw SQL.

Pingback: Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points « Interesting Tech()

Pingback: Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points – blog.serverfault.com « Netcrema – creme de la social news via digg + delicious + stumpleupon + reddit()

Pingback: NerdyRoomTM » Stack Overflow, Server Fault und Co()

• wil

  I’m guessing you have not seen statistics for some sites in similar usage to SO – You would be surprised…

  • sm

    I know it is kind of late to ask it – but could you elaborate how we would be surprised?

    Is the amount of hardware high or low compared to other sites? What is the usage scenario on these other sites: seldom updates and a relativly static page grwoth or many small updates every second (like on so)? How is the search beeing used?Thanks for any feedback

• Nick Craver

  We’re very open about the hardware…we simply didn’t repeat it in this blog post. You can find the complete specs in an earlier post on this very blog: http://blog.serverfault.com/post/1432571770/

  • Demetri Obenour

    dead link

    • Nick Craver

      Thanks for the heads up – at some point that link format died. I’ve updated to the current link here: http://blog.serverfault.com/2010/10/29/1432571770/

• George Beech

  We do both. We backup to disk for fast retrieval and to tape for historical archiving.

Pingback: Marketing Related Articles | Zillion Bits()

Pingback: Ravelry in Bullet Points -- Code Monkey Island()

• Warren

  My guess is that it’s substantially cheaper (currently) to use an existing tool that has support than it is to roll their own

• Matt

  Log analysis and event correlation is a difficult problem and massive effort to build yourself. Why not default to a pre-existing product? Splunk seems affordable.

Pingback: Daily del.icio.us for February 12th through February 15th — Vinny Carpenter's blog()

Pingback: Exectweets » spolsky at 02/11/11 07:31:42()

• George Beech

  Fine print at the bottom: *(excludes fail over and management servers)

  🙂

Pingback: OpenQuality.ru | Качество программного обеспечения()

Pingback: links for 2011年03月03日 » krisd's blog()

Pingback: Stack Overflow架构升级之路()

Pingback: Interesting Links « Endlessly Curious()

Pingback: [repost] Stack Overflow Architecture Update – Now at 95 Million Page Views a Month » New IT Farmer()

Pingback: Delicious Bookmarks for March 13th through March 14th « Lâmôlabs()

Pingback: SQL is dead! Long live SQL! : accidental hacker()