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We've had a few articles on the StackOverlflow Architecture and Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now at 95 Million Page Views a Month. Time for another update. This time from a podcast. Every week or so Jeff, Joel and guests sit around and converse. The result is a podcast. In a recent podcast they talked about some of their recent architecture issues, problems, and updates. And since I wrote this article before my vacation, they've also published a new architecture update article: The Stack Exchange Architecture – 2011 Edition, Episode 1.
My overall impression is they are in a comfortable place, adding new sites, adding new features, making a house a home.
Notable for their scale-up architecture, you might expect with their growth that they would slam into a wall. Not so. They've been able to scale-up the power of individual servers by adding more CPU and RAM. SSD has been added in some cases. Even their flagship StackOverflow product runs on a single server. New machines have been bought, but very few.
So, the StackOverflow experiment shows the scale-up strategy for even largish sites is a good practice. True, their product naturally separates by topic, much like the early Facebook, but Moore's law and quality engineering are your friends. They estimate Amazon would cost them 4 times much.
Here's what StackExchange has been up to:
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