server infrastructure

To ECC or Not To ECC

hardware

To ECC or Not To ECC

On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a little

By Jeff Atwood ·
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scalability

Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs

In My Scaling Hero, I described the amazing scaling story of plentyoffish.com. It's impressive by any measure, but also particularly relevant to us because we're on the Microsoft stack, too. I was intrigued when Markus posted this recent update: Last monday we upgraded our core

By Jeff Atwood ·
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hardware

Building a Computer the Google Way

If you're ever in Silicon Valley, I highly recommend checking out the Computer History Museum. Where else can you see a live demonstration of the only known working PDP-1 in existence, and actually get to play the original Spacewar on it? I did. It was incredible. I got

By Jeff Atwood ·
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