Server

We now have the new servers set up in the data center, and configured with copies of the Stack Overflow website and database. We excitedly ran a few quick speed comparisons with the live site and found.. the new site was two times slower than the old one. (insert sound of analog record needle being…

I mentioned in the last podcast that I wasn’t sure how the two-drive RAID mirroring was supposed to work in the Lenovo RS110 1U servers we bought. This server comes with a mini-PCI RAID card as standard equipment, the LSI 1064E. To set it up, I did the following: Installed two 500 GB “datacenter class”…

In Server Hosting — Rent vs. Buy? I solicited opinions on whether it made more sense to continue renting our Stack Overflow servers, or to buy them. Thanks for everyone’s feedback on that! Now the die is cast — check out these sexy glamour shots of the two (soon to be three) new Stack Overflow…

As Stack Overflow continues to grow, it’s time to revisit our server hosting situation. We currently rent two identical dedicated servers from CrystalTech, which has been an excellent and responsive host for not only SO but Coding Horror as well. If you’re in the market for Windows hosting, I can recommend them without reservation. Although…

You may have noticed that things have been less responsive than usual on stackoverflow.com. The culprit is SQL Server 2008 full-text search. I’ll let Brent explain: Before 2008, full text search wasn’t inside the database – it wasn’t subject to things like transactions. Heck, it was more like Lucene where it lived outside on its…

Based on traffic levels last week — we’re at and beyond where we were at launch — I decided it was time to pursue adding a second server. The second stackoverflow.com server has identical specifications to our first server, that is: Windows Server 2008 x64 Dual Quad-Core Xeon E5320 (1.8 GHz) 4 GB RAM 271GB…

I’ve been hosting codinghorror.com at CrystalTech on a dedicated server for about six months now, and I’ve been quite happy with the performance and availability. Any downtime has been completely my fault, and they’ve been responsive the few times I’ve requested support. So when we needed a beefy dedicated server to host stackoverflow.com, I naturally…