To get an idea of what all of this stuff "does," let me start off with an update on the average day at Stack Overflow. So you can compare to the previous numbers from November 2013, here's a day of statistics from February 9th, 2016 with differences since November 12th, 2013:
- 209,420,973 (+61,336,090) HTTP requests to our load balancer
- 66,294,789 (+30,199,477) of those were page loads
- 1,240,266,346,053 (+406,273,363,426) bytes (1.24 TB) of HTTP traffic sent
- 569,449,470,023 (+282,874,825,991) bytes (569 GB) total received
- 3,084,303,599,266 (+1,958,311,041,954) bytes (3.08 TB) total sent
- 504,816,843 (+170,244,740) SQL Queries (from HTTP requests alone)
- 5,831,683,114 (+5,418,818,063) Redis hits
- 17,158,874 (not tracked in 2013) Elastic searches
- 3,661,134 (+57,716) Tag Engine requests
- 607,073,066 (+48,848,481) ms (168 hours) spent running SQL queries
- 10,396,073 (-88,950,843) ms (2.8 hours) spent on Redis hits
- 147,018,571 (+14,634,512) ms (40.8 hours) spent on Tag Engine requests
- 1,609,944,301 (-1,118,232,744) ms (447 hours) spent processing in ASP.Net
- 22.71 (-5.29) ms average (19.12 ms in ASP.Net) for 49,180,275 question page renders
- 11.80 (-53.2) ms average (8.81 ms in ASP.Net) for 6,370,076 home page renders
You may be wondering about the drastic ASP.Net reduction in processing time compared to 2013 (which was 757 hours) despite 61 million more requests a day. That's due to both a hardware upgrade in early 2015 as well as a lot of performance tuning inside the applications themselves. Please don't forget: performance is still a feature. If you're curious about more hardware specifics than I'm about to provide---fear not. The next post will be an appendix with detailed hardware specs for all of the servers that run the sites (I'll update this with a link when it's live). Read the rest of Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition on Nick's blog here. It's the start of an extensive series of blog posts on Stack Overflow’s technical architecture. Do you enjoy managing hardware? Then check out our network administrator and database administrator job listings.