It's interesting to me that he's got a top 1000 site with standard tools. No "NoSql" or the other such echo chamber flavor of the day fads.
Can get away with this because c#, .net, asp.net and sql server are pretty darn fast?
<fud>
It's been my experience that the standard 2 tier app with a compiled language is usually pretty fast out of the box. Databases are an _almost_ solved problem. The db folks have been at it a long time and you can wring some pretty amazing performance out of sql server|oracle|etc.
Problems:
php is usually slow as sh!t and requires something like eAccelerator to provide decent performance.
Java could be good, but the App Server/Broker/N-tier architecture usually kills performance rather than enhancing it.
Yeah, the MS stack is surprisingly fast out of the box, so long as you avoid using pretty much everything that comes with ASP.NET in the "Rich Controls" department.
We accidentally launched Twiddla and survived our first two Redditings while serving the site from a desktop behind a Business DSL line. Surprisingly, it never batted an eye handling the load.
Probably shouldn't admit it, but up until we finally moved to a real box at a datacenter, the production server doubled as a gaming machine. Even with FarCry running, we never had an issue keeping up with load!
Some domains suit the relational database model better than others. If he was doing a huge amount of machine learning-type stuff he might have a different architecture.
Then again, given that he (like most people, myself included) has a lot of RDB experience, he designed his application around what RDBs do well. Perhaps if he had 10+ years of experience with distributed hash tables he might have designed a site with a different feature set.
Yeah, but services these days that are announcing the usage of a NoSql storage aren't doing any machine learning, they are just storing comments, tags and relationships.
Can get away with this because c#, .net, asp.net and sql server are pretty darn fast?
<fud> It's been my experience that the standard 2 tier app with a compiled language is usually pretty fast out of the box. Databases are an _almost_ solved problem. The db folks have been at it a long time and you can wring some pretty amazing performance out of sql server|oracle|etc.
Problems: php is usually slow as sh!t and requires something like eAccelerator to provide decent performance.
Java could be good, but the App Server/Broker/N-tier architecture usually kills performance rather than enhancing it.
Just me experience. No hard science here. </fud>