stackoverflow - let it flow some more!

I am pretty late in joining the choir, but I think stackoverflow.com is an amazing site.

This is the very definition of Web 2.0. Just try it: ask a question and be amazed ...

The brains behind the site are the heavyweights Joel "on Software" Spolsky and Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood.

There are two interesting podcasts with Jeff Atwood, discussing the creation of the site: Herding Code #14 and Hanselminutes #134.

The podcasts reveal some particular interesting facts about the technical realization [see also here]:

The site is based on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework, which is still beta!

The DBMS is SQL Server 2005

The whole site is running on one server: two quad-core CPUs with 4GB RAM

Web-Server and Database take about the same load

The DB-schema consists of about 16 tables

Basing a heavy-traffic application on beta-technology, thats probably what they call extreme courage.

The server seems quite a lightweight! I have seen enterprise applications with a lot less load that supposedly needed much more horsepower...

I would have expected more tables in the schema... but maybe they were talking only about the dynamic part of the data...

follow me on twitter, I need some friends :-)