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0 pointsmanigandham4y ago0 comments

Most of that is extra unused capacity. They've shared their load graphs and past anecdotes where it's clear the entire site runs very lean.

Also 23 is very much a couple for a company and application of that size. It's not uncommon to see several hundred or thousands of nodes deployed by similar sites.

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TheCoelacanth4y ago

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.

manigandhamOP4y ago

> "They aren't magically more efficient than other sites"

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.

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