community February 27, 2009

Happy 100,000th Question!

I’ve been remiss in not celebrating an important Stack Overflow milestone. Sometime on Wednesday, February 25th, a user asked.. Our 100,000th Question! I didn’t say it was a good question, mind you. But it was the hundred thousandth question posted to Stack Overflow. So, for reference — and remember our private beta started on 7/31/2008,…

Jeff Atwood Co-Founder (Former)

I’ve been remiss in not celebrating an important Stack Overflow milestone. Sometime on Wednesday, February 25th, a user asked..

Our 100,000th Question!

birthday-cake-animated

I didn’t say it was a good question, mind you. But it was the hundred thousandth question posted to Stack Overflow.

So, for reference — and remember our private beta started on 7/31/2008, and the public beta on 9/15/2008 — here’s how many questions and answers have been posted to date, by month:

	Questions	Answers
July 08	5	4
August 08	4,612	25,488
September 08	16,291	89,369
October 08	16,474	74,469
November 08	14,164	54,752
December 08	13,587	55,273
January 09	17,741	70,612
February 09*	15,941	60,397

We are pretty regularly doing 500k pageviews per day now. Geoff has also been tracking our bandwidth usage through the most excellent Cacti tool. Here’s what the last 24 hour period looks like:

soweb1-traffic-daily-cacti-graph

So far:

peak of 6 Mbit/sec or 750 KB/sec
average of 4 Mbit/sec or 512 KB/sec

That’s actually a lot for a site like ours which is nearly 100% text with precious few images.

And compressed text at that! We’ve had the GZIP religion for a long time, but last night we went through and double checked everything to be sure. I did some port 80 sniffing and found a few cases where content wasn’t served up compressed, even when the client asked for it. Looking for commonalities and doing research, I discovered that HTTP 1.0 traffic and proxy traffic wasn’t being compressed. Turns out those are both off by default in IIS 7. I turned them on like so:

%windir%system32inetsrvappcmd set config 
    /section:httpCompression /noCompressionForHttp10:false
%windir%system32inetsrvappcmd set config 
    /section:httpCompression /noCompressionForProxies:false

I was surprised how many proxies actually identify themselves as HTTP 1.0, given how ancient HTTP 1.1 is. It’s especially ironic considering many of these very same proxies asked for gzip content — I’m not sure GZIP compression is even valid under HTTP 1.0.

But I digress. Congratulations to everyone who has helped make Stack Overflow a success by asking and answering questions. Here’s to many more years of learning together!