Stackoverflow.com scaling problem

I have been stackoverflow user almost from the very start of the website. I recall reading some Jeff Atwood's blog posts and thinking how naive he is. He has a classic case of Microsoft fanboy-ism. He swears by .net and MSSQL server and spits on Linux, PHP and... well... entire LAMP stack.

When stack became popular the website started to get a lot of traffic and Jeff was all like "Oh we don't need all the scaling technology that all the web companies have developed since web 1.0 till today. We're smarter, we use the all-powerful Microsoft stack, we'll just buy more RAM, more CPU and keep it all on single machine. Machines are so powerful these days and cost almost nothing". How little did he know.

As more and more people use the website it seems that they reached the limit of what is possible. Stack website is now inaccessible for days. By inaccessible, I don't mean that the site does not open. It just open waaaay too slow to be usable. I sometimes wait 5 minutes to get the home page.

What I really regret is all those dumb readers on Jeff's codinghorror blog, and all those fanboys on stack website. Some people tried to tell Jeff that this would happen, but he would not listen. He was very arrogant and dismissed all that as LAMP-crap. All his followers blindly followed his thoughts as if they really wanted that to be true. Psychology of a herd, I'd say.

Oh well, too bad that public access to such valuable resource is now limited because of stubborn owners. Maybe it's time for a real competitor to step up, with a simple slogan: "just like stackoverflow, except that it really works".

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2011-12-01