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by TheCoelacanth
1742 days ago
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Two of their servers have 1.5 TB of RAM each. Just one of those nodes is probably as powerful and expensive as 100 nodes in a thousand node setup. They aren't magically more efficient than other sites. They just chose to scale vertically instead of horizontally. |
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It's certainly not magic but good architecture decisions and solid engineering. This includes choosing SQL Server over other databases (especially when they started), using ASP.NET server-side as a monolithic app with a focus on fast rendering, and yes, scaling vertically on their own colo hardware. The overall footprint for the scale they serve is very small.
It's the sum of all these factors together, and it absolutely makes them more efficient than many other sites.