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Microsoft Migrates Internal Servers to 64-bit
daria42 writes "Microsoft says servers running the company's website and MSN Search and Messenger applications have been migrated to the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. 'Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,' a spokesperson said. In addition, 'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.' According to the company, the Messenger servers handle about 70 million users."
could just be isp/routing issues.
Works for me, and i'm in the uk also.
They've got to do it. If they don't make the switch, how can they expect customers to?!
If you read the original article, the server is apparently quite stable (makes sense: servers run just a few processes intensively but repetitively, and cracks would show quickly), it's the client that is more questionable:
Microsoft moved most of there servers to HP DL585 systems which are Opteron based.
They had a big press release about it not too long ago.
I don't think there are stats about unique visitors.
Just pages served per month/day
Sample this!
Before W2k was out, Microsoft migrated most internal, and everything external to W2k before it was gold. Before E2k3 was released, Microsoft was running it on all internal servers. Before W2k3 was released, Microsoft was running it on all internal and external servers. Before XP was released most workstations were upgraded to it. Microsoft has always been a very much proponent of "eating your own dog food". And yes when it goes gold Microsoft moves to that version and it's the same version sold to everyone else.
You do realize that Intel's latest Xeons have the same AMD64 instructions too, right?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
that would explain why my throwaway hotmail account (for recieving commercial email, and all the spam that ensues) was broken the last few days. I thought they had nerfed it again to break even more functionality in firefox and safari (they did that before) and I was just going to abandon it before I would ever load up msie. I just checked it today and it is working again.
More music, fewer hits
Any version of MacOS/X isn't actually 64 bit code, or not too much of it. It just uses some addressing extensions to be able to use more than 4 gigabytes RAM, but nothing else.
By comparison, 64 bit Windows _is_ almost entirely 64 bit code. If you want to run 32 bit code on it, it runs in a "WOW" (Windows On Windows) virtual machine. Well, not virtual in the same way as say, Java, but in the same way as, say, Wine.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Indeed they are - they recently bought a pile of Sun Fire V20z and V40z dual/quad Opteron servers from Sun - you can even see the Sun and Microsoft engineers posing in front of the racks here.
The limits is an performance one not code, in any of the oses you are likely to find some "reasonable default" together with a maximum setting, which could of course have been higher/use another data type if there was a use for it. I guess you can change the values for Windows settings and in some BSDs atleast you'll be limited by the maximum amount of file descriptors for the system, maybe for the user depending on settings and in NetBSD and older OpenBSDs (I think they changed it in the newer ones) a thing called NMBCLUSTERS which the documentation doesn't mention much about.
Of course they could all use 64 bit datatypes for the setting and allow someone to allocate whatever GB amount of ram for holding only the filedescriptors but what use would it be if the machine would be way to slow to use with that many simultaneus users.
Yes, most of the streaming and ad content and certainly the DNS is Akamai based. Those are the 3 key services designed to take down your servers. The fact that Akamai won't run them on Windows, since it's painful to administer remotely and nearly impossible to secure, is an endless source of embarassment to Microsoft.
Windows was already 64 bit when the DEC Alpha came out. Which was somewhere between 1992-95 IIRC.
The only news is is that windows now actually runs on a popular 64 bit processor. It already ran on Itanium for some time too.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Except that the DEC Alpha port of Windows NT was 32-bit only. IIRC, Microsoft never officially released a 64-bit version of Windows that ran on Alpha, and it was DEC/Compaq who did most of the development on it before it was cancelled.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Although the maximum nonpaged pool size in the 32 bit versions is 256MB, but it may be auto-set to less if you have less than 1GB of memory. You can override the default by setting HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\NonPagedPoolSize to the number of bytes you want the pool to be.
You can use the driver verifier's (verifier.exe) pool tracking function to see how much memory tcpip.sys is taking up.
The nonpaged pool limit in the 64 bit versions is 128GB.
Further, a 64-bit version of Windows has been available for years--on the IA64 architecture.
Finally, do you have any evidence to back up that slander you wrote about David Cutler "basically stealing" code from DEC? I realize this is a long-cherished myth held by certain knee-jerk reactionary MS-obsessed types, but it has been convincingly dispelled in the past. Do you have any new evidence to add, other than mere accusation?
I'm no huge fan of MS, but badmouthing people with accusations of serious misconduct without evidence should be confronted.
Ignoring the absolutely scary fact that you're using hungarian...
Are you in debug mode or release mode? If the optimizer's not active, then of course you're not getting optimal code. That looks to me like the fairly typical code VC tends to generate when the optimizer is turned off. Stack variables when registers would have worked fine, pushing and popping unused registers, etc. In fact, I'm pretty damned certain the optimizer hasn't actually been over that code yet. Perhaps your Visual Studio skills aren't quite up to snuff.