Top all-time · #414
Nick Craver
Personal blog · nickcraver.com/blogprogrammingsystemsweb
Nick Craver's personal blog at nickcraver.com covers programming, systems and web. Since 2012, 137 different Hacker News readers have linked it 171 times, most often “StackOverflow Architecture (2016)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nick Craver's 2013-2016 Stack Overflow architecture series to show how a heavily used site ran on few servers, with caching and bare metal.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Website home for various things created by Nick Craver
Most-linked posts?
- StackOverflow Architecture (2016)43 people · 47 mentions · first linked 2016-06-07
- Stack Overflow: The Hardware – 2016 Edition16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2016-03-29
- Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring – 2018 Edition10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-11-28
- Stack Overflow: A Technical Deconstruction8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-02-03
- Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching – 2019 Edition8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-08-06
- Stack Overflow: The Architecture – 2016 Edition7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-02-17
- What it takes to run Stack Overflow7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-11-22
- What it takes to run Stack Overflow5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-11-05
- HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-05-22
- /blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-do-deployment-2016-edition/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
What Hacker News says?
They have details here: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... Lots of caching, lots of RAM, SSD storage, and a low-level ORM for SQL.
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “You Are Not Google (2017)”Submitted HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road as a story · 574 points
HN discussionhttps://stackexchange.com/performance https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... Lots of caching (redis, CloudFlare) and trying not to use the database unless absolutely necessary, I would expect.
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “You Are Not Google (2017)”Submitted Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment as a story · 428 points
HN discussionAh the old cloud provider switcheroo. Yip this is the way they make money. They make it easy to setup some gigantic hugely scalable website then hit you with a gigantic scaled up bill. AWS would do this as well. Team I'm in at the moment is in the early stages of cloud adoption but the company in total has fell hook line and sinker for AWS. When I mentioned the cost there is always an excuse. The main one being that…
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “I got pwned by my cloud costs”Submitted Stack Overflow: The Architecture – 2016 Edition as a story · 328 points
HN discussionA better example might be stack overflow that ran on four(?) boxes for a long while (two sql server s, two iis/dot.net application/web servers). They now have a few more bits: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “Learn how to design large-scale systems”Submitted Stack Overflow: The Hardware – 2016 Edition as a story · 166 points
HN discussionFor people who enjoyed this post but want to see the other side of the spectrum where self hosted is the norm I'll point to the now classic series of posts on how Stack Overflow runs its infra: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... If anyone has newer posts like the above, please reply with links as I would love to read them.
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret”Submitted StackOverflow Architecture (2016) as a story · 122 points
HN discussionLots of details on StackOverflow’s architecture here: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “GitHub Package Registry”Submitted Why you should wait on upgrading to .Net 4.6 as a story · 116 points
HN discussionHere are some recent ones that have been popular: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter-handle... https://redditblog.com/2017/1/17/caching-at-reddit/ https://blog.twitter.com/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twit... https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-ju... https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-tech... https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/instant-messag.…
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-technical-deconstruction/
on “How We Built r/Place”Submitted Stack Overflow running short on space as a story · 96 points
HN discussion> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS? And what did start-ups do before AWS et al ? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS? I understand it's more 'agil…
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/
on “How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler”Submitted What it takes to run Stack Overflow as a story · 36 points
HN discussionhttp://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-... FWIW here's a write up on their process Also I imagine that 10 minutes included dev and testing, not just the deployment part of "rolling out"
Comment linking /blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-do-deployment-2016-edition/
on “Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem”Submitted Stack Overflow Developer Desktop Build – 2019 as a story · 27 points
HN discussionA couple of my favorite blogs - http://antirez.com/ - https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing - https://ma.tt/ - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://www.johndcook.com/blog - http://feross.org/ - https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ - https://blog.andrewcantino.com/ - https://nickcraver.com/blog/ - https://blog.acolyer.org - https://blog.coding…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring – 2018 Edition as a story · 15 points
HN discussionApparently HackerNews used to run from a single application server + Cloudflare caching, but later moved away from Cloudflare. Unsure how many web servers it runs on now. [0] In 2016, Stack Overflow ran on 11 IIS web servers, but they really only needed 1. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344 [1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
on “New Grad vs. Senior Dev”Submitted Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching – 2019 Edition as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/
on “Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation”Submitted Why you should wait on upgrading to .Net 4.6 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOk, 2 web servers, 2 db servers back in 2013, one of the most visited sites out there. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-...
Comment linking /blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-overflow/
on “How to burn the most money with a single click in Azure”Submitted Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching – 2019 Edition as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> the biggest one is db.r5.24xlarge with 48 cores and 768 gb ram. I imagine that can take you quite a long way--perhaps even into millions of users territory That will run Stackoverflow's db by itself for reference, along with sensible caching (they're very read-heavy and cache like crazy). Here's their hardware for their SQL server for 2016: 2 Dell R720xd Servers featuring: Dual E5-2697v2 Processors (12 cores @2.7–…
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/
on “Scaling to 100k Users”Submitted Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching – 2019 Edition as a story · 4 points
HN discussionStackOverflow is known to operate their own servers on their own datacenters and as far I recently read, they are still tuning with no container tech. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we...
Comment linking /blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-do-deployment-2016-edition/
on “Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?”Submitted What it takes to run Stack Overflow as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
