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 Thursday, August 23, 2007

Scalability - TechCrunch Runs On 1 Web Server And 1 Database Server. Huh?

highscalability.com pointed out an article from Pingdom titled "What the Web’s most popular sites are running on", which shows the results from an infrastructure survey of 7 popular web "super sites" (TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, Alexaholic).

There is some intriguing information in the survey, but one thing stood out.  Apparently, TechCrunch runs on 1 web server and 1 database server, with no server clustering:


I almost find this hard to believe.  They serve > 1 million unique visitors per month off of this?

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#    Comments [3] |
Thursday, August 23, 2007 1:30:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
1 web server and 1 database server should easily handle that load, it's a blog after all, so pretty much read only. It works out around 1 page/second on average. Some attention to caching and you're all set.
manycore
Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:11:26 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
> 1 web server and 1 database server should easily
> handle that load, it's a blog after all, so pretty much read only.

But its one of the most highly trafficked blogs on the net.. serving dynamic content to millions of viewers. It also hosts forums and comments.

> It works out around 1 page/second on average.

My math would put it at much higher rates than that.

Anyways, I just found it to be odd that such a popular site uses such small infrastructure. If it is indeed true, then good for them :)
Corey
Friday, August 24, 2007 8:50:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
That is amazing to me too. One thing might be that it's got 4cpus and 40G of ram. It's amazing what they're putting in "one" server and for pretty cheap nowadays. I just got a dual core, 3.something, 4G ram, 160G/7200rpm business workstation for like $1500. Here's one that smoke that if you put some more RAM in it:

IBM eServer xSeries 335 Server - 2 x Xeon 2.6GHz - 512MB DDR SDRAM - 2 x 36GB - Ultra320 SCSI RAID Controller
$2,648.94
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