Main Meeting - The Architecture of Stack Overflow: Building Better Gerbils

A tour of the architecture of Stack Overflow, from the physical to the software. I’ll explain what we use, what the setup is, and why a piece of infrastrucure is what it is. We use a combination of data stores from SQL to redis to elastic search to handle about 40 million page views a day and 4 billion hits a month. I’ll cover what’s in the data center, what’s in the web stack, and what examples of choices we make in our own software to keep page load times as low as possible. A lot of the things we do to stay fast end up as open-source, I’ll include a quick look at those projects as well. Q&A is more than welcome, we’re pretty open about almost everything.

Speaker:
I’m Nick Craver, a software developer and systems administrator for Stack Exchange. I have been developing software for 14 years and have been building Stack Overflow for the last 3. I maintain our database and search systems, and help design and optimize most of our other systems to run faster and leaner so we can continue to scale. I live primarily in the C# space, but will debug anything you give me. I also like long walks on the beach, unless it’s chilly.

Meeting Agenda:

5:30-6:00 - Welcome/Food
6:00-6:15 - Announcements
6:15-7:45 - Presentation
7:45-8:00 - Give-aways

Thank you to the March Main Meeting sponsor!

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