[sigusr1]

If you haven't seen stackoverflows server architecture posts you'd probably enjoy them: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

I still think containers are great, and I really like the abstractions kubernetes provides, but if I ever had enough traffic to worry about scaling, I envision running a small cluster of very powerful computers rather than 100s of weak ones.

[Joeri]

So basically, through careful engineering, they can run stackoverflow.com, one of the top-ten sites in the world, on a single web server and a single database server. Beefy machines for sure, but it kind of takes the air out of the web-scale hype balloon.

[brianwawok]

Ya I love this as a counterpoint to much scaling.

Stackoverflow has pretty good uptime and pretty good performance, can't fault the end result.

[mrep]

> one of the top-ten sites in the world

49th actually: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com

[toomuchtodo]

Physical servers they host themselves, mind you.

[Bromskloss]

Huh? Why are they running Windows?

[e12e]

I don't know about the rest of the (initial) team, but Joel was lead on Excel as I recall. If you have a group if devs that know the nt kernel, SQL server and iis very well - why would you not use the ms stack?

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Linux and Free software myself - but that doesn't mean the thousands of Man years sybase and ms have spent on their stack is wasted effort.

[Joeri]

Because they thought it was the better choice for them. You cannot argue with the result.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-StackExchange-StackOverflow-u...