That's a primary and backup server for Stackoverflow and a primary/backup for SE. But they each have the full dataset for their sites, not actual horizontal scaling. Also that page is just a static marketing tool, not very representative of their current stack. See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/374585/is-the-stack...

Having most of the servers be loaded at about 5% CPU usage feels extremely wasteful, but at the same time I guess it's better to have the spare capacity for something that you really want to keep online, given the nature of the site.

However, if they have a peak of 450 web requests per second and somewhere between 11000 - 23800 SQL queries per second, that'd mean between 25 - 53 SQL queries to serve a single request. There's probably a lot of background processes and whatnot (and also queries needed for web sockets) that cut the number down and it's not that bad either way, but I do wonder why that is.

The apps with good performance that I've generally worked with attempted to minimize the amount of DB requests needed to serve a user's request (e.g. session cached in Redis/Valkey and using DB views to return an optimized data structure that can be returned with minimal transformations).

Either way, that's a quite beefy setup!