New Hardware for Stack Overflow Database

George Beech

We’ve been doing a lot of talking about some of the growing pains we have been having with our database server. And how we are going to deal with it. Well we will be moving Stack Overflow’s database to its own hardware this Friday (2011-03-11).

When?

2011-03-11 9:00pm Eastern (2011-03-12 02:00 UTC)

Why?

To Make everything MORE AWESOME

What?

2 new Dell R710′s

  • 2x Intel Xeon Processor X5680 3.33 GHz
  • 96GB of RAM
  • 6 Intel X25-E SSD’s in a RAID 10

What will this mean?

First, we will be putting Stack Overflow into Read Only mode again for the maintenance – just like we did when we went down the Oregon trail. Once the migration is complete, Stack Overflow will be on its own DB pair, and can run free, and the rest of the Stack Exchange sites don’t have to contend with the Megalopolis for database time, making them MORE AWESOME as well.

Posted by George Beech (@GABeech) on March 11th, 2011
Filed under Hardware, maintenance, network-status
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  • thing2k

    2011-04-11 02:00 UTC? Don’t you mean 2011-03-12 02:00 UTC?

    • http://blog.stackoverflow.com George Beech

      No, the date rolls over at 00:00 so when you convert from 9pm EST (21:00 EST) to 2am UTC you pass midnight and the date rolls over for UTC, but not EST.

      GAH SORRY … yes he was right, I had the month/day swapped. fixed the post

      • Heathhunnicutt

        April 11th or March 12th? You obviously mean March 12.

      • Jeff Dion

        I think that what Thing2k was mentionning is the month change in UTC time

  • Ross Smith

    2011-04-11 02:00 UTC? Don’t you mean 2011-03-11 02:00 UTC?

    • Anonymous

      Dates are hard.

      • Drachenstern

        let’s go shopping?

        • http://blog.stackoverflow.com George Beech

          Already went shopping :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Daniel-Hilgarth/100000976248273 Daniel Hilgarth

    I guess, it should be 2011-03-12 02:00 UTC

  • http://www.facebook.com/emaillenin Lenin Raj

    How long the migration activity is going to happen?

  • http://vikas-patidar.myopenid.com/ Vikas Patidar

    Awesome man !!! Keep going on as well as keep growing on.

  • Nobody

    s/it’s/its/g

    • Ben Blank

      That’s what I love about the StackExchange community — even the grammar/spelling “trolls” are polite and helpful. :-)

  • Robert

    Death to EXPERTS EXCHANGE!

    • Edward Ishaq

      They used to come up on many searches I did but not any more now that we have stackoverflow and the rest …

      • http://twitter.com/glenneroo glenneroo

        They also used to not be such douchebags and only required a (free) login to read answers. Now they require you to pay to even see any answers, unless you were one of the few who contributed x-thousand answers.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Louis-Waweru/713191712 Louis Waweru

          …answers per month.

        • Guest

          …or know to press End and just read it for free.

          • Gareth

            …but only if you’ve clicked through from a Google search result.

      • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_EZDRKILV4KYS33YNZG4BWIV5RY EJB

        With the new version of chrome (released yesterday), you can block a site from showing up in your future google searches – experts-exchange was the very first one I blocked – finally.

        • nikic

          That’s nothing to do with Chrome. That’s a Google feature. It’ll work in every newer browser.

  • Sam

    hoe many more hours we have from NOW?

  • dforck42

    Is Brent O helping with the move?

    • http://blog.stackoverflow.com George Beech

      As usual he gave us a ton of help on the planning and checked our work.

  • http://flowdev.co.uk/ Oliver Caldwell

    Looks like this will be one hell of a boost :D

    MORE AWESOME

  • http://www.hydroxic-acid.com Hydroxic-Acid

    StackOverflow++

  • http://www.shrinkrays.net Chris

    Disqus was so crappy 1 year ago, now the entire internet uses it.

    Anyway…I think a stackoverflow question – bounty 1000 – to build a custom database just for the SO format (open source’d obviously) would be an interesting idea. Even if you never implement it, the potential there is big

    • http://blog.gockelhut.com/ Travis

      What makes SO so unique that it would require a custom solution?

      • http://www.shrinkrays.net Chris

        Have a look at the schema, most of the data is a page in SQL Server

  • asaikali

    nice, machines what database server do you run? It would be great to know what technologies and platform the stackoverflow uses.

    • artmasa

      ASP.NET MVC and I guess SQL Server

    • http://blog.stackoverflow.com George Beech

      We actually just published a post about the technologies we use: http://blog.serverfault.com/post/stack-exchanges-architecture-in-bullet-points/

      Every now and again we’ll update everyone in that style, but if you keep reading here you can keep up on what we are doing.

      But to answer your question Stack Exchange uses the Windows stack, so we use MSSQL Server.

  • Ben Sapp

    RAID 5 is MORE AWESOME than RAID 10 for solid state drives.

  • http://profiles.google.com/bolibic Javier Gonel

    Does that configuration do failover without the hassle of a SAN/NAS?