Stackoverflow's WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) Architecture

I will also be "that guy"---as another commenter said---mainly due to the author's title and finishing rhetoric, even though he is not even attempting to make any convincing arguments in the body but merely pointing out SO's technology stack which has been known since quite some time.<p>Yes, StackOverflow is a nice success story for a .NET stack, but I think an important piece here is actually mentioned by Joel:<p>"We are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and <i>maybe that’s because they are not good programmers</i>"<p>StackOverflow says little about "the power of <i>WISC</i>" and more about Attwood and Spolsky being good, experienced Microsoft-tech developers. We cannot compare the power of WISC vs the power of LAMP (for example) when performance and productivity are metrics. It's hard enough to compare each one on its own, but even harder to mix the two. The purported value is thus a red herring. Compare SQL Server to MySQL or C# to PHP, and then we'll have a discussion.<p>"Can you beat phenomenal performance, reduced CPU usage and great productivity which now comes at no cost up-front?" I can copy and paste that into any flamewar thread on any side of the argument and it will still make sense and you will still want to agree. The reader here agrees with the question, and never with the thesis---as much of a thesis there can be in this post, which is only implied. An unbiased question to be asked should be, free licenses or not, is WISC worth it? Well, no:<p>* Windows -- Yuck. The only reason to ever want to develop on Windows is if you are using the AllegroCL IDE[1]. Windows as a server? Is there ever any argument there, or is just acquiescence due to the rest of the stack?<p>* IIS -- Seriously? Have you ever had to manage a farm of servers all running IIS? There may be tools out there to automate IIS maintenance across servers, but do they beat good ol' text config files?<p>* SQL Server -- Fine, it may have its merits without needing 10 years of experience, so again, where's the SQL Server vs MySQL practical comparison?<p>* C# -- Mixed feelings. If you're stuck with the above three, not too terrible of a choice if you know the language well and are in a hurry. Else, learn Boo.<p>Pardon my sarcasm, but there really is no point in belaboring the merits of WISC in terms of performance or productivity. It has its place, and its values, but this leads to a different discussion.<p>But here's kind of what I felt[2] when I was developing on the MS stack at my previous job:<p>"I once saw a nature special in which some insect or other dragged some other dead insect somewhere then turned around and dug a whole for it to bury it but the researchers moved the dead insect a bit while it was digging so it had to drag it back but while it did they filled in the hole and back and forth this insect went indefinitely until a PETA sniper took out the researchers."[3]<p>[1] The AllegroCL IDE is only "full-fledged" on Windows.<p>[2] After taking the red pill, of course.<p>[3] Kenny Tilton on comp.lang.lisp

MS is not a horrible stack to develop on. It performs great and for the most part you can avoid a lot of the licensing costs anyway - on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.<p>SQL Server starts free and it was actually only halfway through last year that I stopped using the free version at Playtomic. It's also the only significantly expensive part - and very easy to not use in favor of something that is free/open source/cheaper/whatever.<p>I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup - a few days ago I calculated some current numbers: 29 million unique people logged over 3 billion events during a 10 day period. It's holding up well enough for me and my very lean, mostly Microsoft-flavored startup.<p>Yesterday I came across this writeup on what Quora is built on too:<p><a href="http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined" rel="nofollow">http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined</a>

I hate to be "that guy" but<p>"(...)When I compare our performance to similar sites that are running on the open source stack, we are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and maybe that’s because they are not good programmers. But just in terms of the types of queries we are doing and stuff, the Microsoft stack is actually, appears to be paying for itself – in terms of reduced hardware”<p>Doesn't really provide any real justifications. I have indeed anecdotally heard good things about mssql, but apart from that I have a hard time believing you couldn't get more or less identical performance from jvm/linux/etc (and maybe mysql/postgres really can give mssql a run for its money, but I admittedly know little about relative database performance)<p>On the other hand, it seems like Jeff/Joel had lots of experience with the MS stack before, so its not an illogical choice. You want to spend your time building a product, not wasting it figuring a new stack you aren't very familiar with.

Although we use MS for our core we do use Linux and open source projects as part of our stack. The routers/firewalls, redis for caching, and haproxy for load balancing are all run on Linux. In addition we use Linux for a lot of the management such as Bacula for backups and Nagios for monitoring. We try to be open about our infrastructure and both George and I blog about the changes we make at <a href="http://blog.serverfault.com" rel="nofollow">http://blog.serverfault.com</a>

Sorry, but with all the respect I have for Joel and Jeff, almost every-time one tells about "why I prefer using windows for my scalable website rather than open source solutions", it reminds me the quote from the Woodie Allen's movie<p><pre><code> "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." </code></pre> It is all about an imaginary benefit, as an outcome of a silly process (eggs from that imaginary chicken, saving $$ by choosing MS).<p>Even if you tend to believe MS-SQL is the best database out there, there is no way, coding/testing/distributing your layers (and trust me, there are plenty of them at SO) in C#/Windows is better than {Python||Ruby}/Posix.<p>This is my opinion, based on my experience from smaller scale web apps, if at small scale the gap is huge, when things grows to millions of page-views a day, the gap is far larger.<p>Just try to imagine friend-feed, reddit, facebook, justin-tv or any other large website, you name it, scaling and pushing versions on top of MS platform.

It's funny because Microsoft is known for selling their solutions but in my experience their main problem is they don't know how to sell solutions. A lot of the white papers they put out are just laughable.<p>If what is being said in this post is correct (and my personal anecdotal evidence suggests it is) than Microsoft needs to hire the best Ruby and Python developers they can find. Have a program written in both languages on a Linux stack and then write the same program on a Windows stack. Then open source it all so anyone who knows ruby or python can point to code mistakes that might inhibit performance.<p>Once that's all done MS should stress test all the solutions and publish the results.<p>The Razor engine is the most credible thing MS has given the development community in a while so there's no time like the present.

I think the open source stack alternative is getting a bad rap here mostly because of MySQL, which has historically not scaled well on multi-CPU systems.<p>C# is certainly faster than a Python or Ruby but you pay a price in development speed (or perhaps Joel would argue not - if you're a C# expert but Ruby newb you'll probably go faster with what you know).<p>But you could use Clojure or Java if that's a concern.

Am I the only one who noticed this?<p>"This entire site is serving 16million pages a month and we’re doing it off of 2 servers, which are almost completely unloaded. So we’ve got a ton of headroom on those 2 servers – one server is a webserver, the other server is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and they’re both 8 core Xeons."<p>They have only one web server and one database server? Does Joel not understand the concept of "single point of failure"?

WISC? I have a vewwy gweat fwiend in Wome called WISC.