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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."
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.
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.
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
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.