[buckbova]

"Stack Overflow runs off a single server" that is a cluster of how many physical servers with how many processors and how much ram?

  Three Dell R720xd database servers (two in New York City, one in Oregon, using SQL AlwaysOn Clustering) (Global "Sites" DB & Stack Overflow dedicated):

  - 2x Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680 @ 2.70 GHz
  - 384 GB RAM
  - 21 drives
  - Mirrored Pair for OS
  - 16+1 Intel 710 200GB SSD RAID10 for databases
  - SQL Server 2014 CTP2
  - 2x 10Gb network team

[kmontrose]

David means a single primary, there's a read-only replica for in DC failover and a read-only replica in our other DC for "New York is getting hit by another hurricane"-failover.

A few services hit the read replicas instead of the primary (our API, for example, moves what it can when it can), but the code for stackoverflow.com is almost entirely querying a single (quite beefy) box.

We can and do sometimes run without either replica in the AG, though we prefer not to except for scheduled maintenance.

[noselasd]

The hardware specs as of December 2013 are here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...