artificial ignorance

I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky’s for a while. Even today, I tell potential Microsoft recruits stories from the article Spolsky wrote back in 2000 about his time at Microsoft (which was actually what convinced me to interview at Microsoft when I was still in school, and then join Microsoft years later):

At Microsoft, if you’re the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you’ve been at the company for less than six months, it doesn’t matter – you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period.

I’ve also previously confessed my bro-mance for Jeff Atwood. Smart, witty, great writer – love the guy. Anyhow, I digress…

It is no surprise to anyone that StackOverflow is a roaring success due to the combined efforts of Jeff and Joel. As many of you may know, StackOverflow is built using the WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) stack and StackOverflow is also a BizSpark startup. It’s always comforting when someone praises your products, especially when it’s unsolicited. So when my good friend, Greg, sent me a link to this video of Spolsky speaking at Google about StackOverflow, I was really intrigued. In the video, Joel talks about StackOverflow and it got really interesting starting at around 24:56 in to the video ((I did my best to transcribe what Joel was saying):

“We were really obsessed about performance – we knew that getting fast answers and the site being “snippy” and “snappy” and quick and stuff like that was important. So here’s the technology stack that we actually used – [we] built on the Microsoft stack. The performance, I know you guys don’t use it that much here, but the performance of C#, which is a compiled language is just ridiculously good. 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. But, there were a lot of oppositions that went in there but no matter what people say this is a pretty good stack. And one of the things that I’ve always been concerned about is if you start building a technology like this using the Microsoft stack you are going to pay for a Windows Server license, lots of SQL Server licenses, which are 5000 bucks for every box that you put out. And the idea that you could possibly use a larger number of cheaper computers and use Open Source products which are free certainly occurred to us. On the other hand 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.”

Since StackOverflow is in the BizSpark program, they are entitled to all kinds of software, including Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (specifically what Joel calls out the costs for) to use in production for pretty much no cost (companies pay $100 when they exit the program) for 3 years. Can you beat phenomenal performance, reduced CPU usage and great productivity which now comes at no cost up-front?

“ai”

[Update: Corrected a broken link]

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