Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexchamberlain | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting overview. It shows that the majority of a (Q&A) site can be run on "just" 9 servers - we're not talking scaling to thousands of servers here.

I'd be interested to know what DBMS they're running, and it's very interesting that they've moved the tag "indices" out to their own cluster. I'd also be interested to know whether they run out of 1 datacentre and how/if they mitigate that risk.

View on HN

also interesting is how quora, with presumably less traffic , but built on python, said in a press release associated with their last large raise (50MM I believe ) that majority of the money would be spent on EC2 bills - I'll update this thread with a link when I find it

update: http://www.quora.com/What-will-Quora-do-with-the-50-million-...

"We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it's looking like EC2."

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

TL;DR Microsoft stack and 2 datacentres: NJ and Oregon.

Plus they have a lot of spare capacity on the hardware. Even if traffic were to double they wouldn't need new servers to keep things running smoothly.

A lot of spare capacity on the CPU != a lot of spare capacity. They are most likely much more constrained wrt RAM and disk ops

I very much doubt that's the case for their web servers. Note how they only opted for 48GB on their web servers vs the much larger numbers on their DB servers?

I'd be interested to know what DBMS they're running

MS SQL Server, latest version probably

Correct, Microsoft SQL Server 2014.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com