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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."
'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.'
Aren't they using Akamai's help in that?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load. With a couple of thousand servers in place, it would be interesting to see how many queries per second MSN search can handle per box as compared with Google...
...they voided the computers' warranties.
Circumcision is child abuse.
**I don't care if it's "Windows super magic XP ME 06 tournament edition". Untill you've had enough time to see how it performs for others you keep a system you know works.**
uhh... which is EXACTLY why they're making this announcement.. so that there is "somebody" out there for it works. they're trying to boost it's acceptance you know.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This has got to be one of the dumbest comments I've ever read.
Untill you've had enough time to see how it performs for others you keep a system you know works.
You're saying that Microsoft, with all of its expertise at hand, is going to wait for a few other companies to roll out their OS before they do, so they can see how it goes? Give me a break. And more to the point, why would anyone else use it if even Microsoft won't. Dumb, just dumb.
And they probably had far better OS utilization of the 64 bit architecture with their VMS or Unix. So what.
They also had much better capability and accuracy, allowing you to search for exactly what you wanted, not just what was most popular, allowing things like the near keyword, partial word wildcarding, and many more.
Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts. The market has stagnated under Google who can't figure out how to offer even as good a search as their competitors offered at the time they launched.
Tell me something useful.
Anyone who is willing to switch there entire network over to something only out of beta for a few days is an idiot. It's that simple.
In fact they've running it for months, even before the RTM date. Do you have a better way to debug the OS than putting it in servers which receive 30 millions of visits each day? (They have a farm of those to serve those 30 millions, so if one of them crashes and you lose one connection is not a big deal)
BTW, OSDL did the same by putting linux 2.5 development versions in all their servers (getting uptimes of 200+ days in some cases BTW)
The only way to get a BSOD on XP is to have some really broken drivers. So I'm guessing that as long as MS's servers stick to some hardware configuration known to work, they wouldn't need more reboots than any other OS does.
I mean, let's face it, it's a server. It doesn't really need the latest ATI gaming drivers, nor a 9800 XT running at 80 Celsius just from showing the desktop, nor some experimental NForce 4 software-RAID drivers, nor a fancy sound card, etc.
More importantly, it doesn't get all the crap installed as a driver, that a gaming rig gets. E.g., idiotic copy protection drivers. (StarForce comes to mind.) Nor the hundreds of spyware crap that your average desktop computer gets.
So they don't really have a reason to crash lots.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Microsoft have been doing this for a while. By the time they released Windows Server 2003 they'd been running Microsoft.com on the platform with IIS 6 for 6 months. Not only do they eat their own dogfood, but they eat their own beta dogfood. To me that says confidence in the platform, which is what their customers want to hear. If they suffered a major hack or a site outage I might agree with you, but this is a server level platform and it must be stable and secure before release, and I'll bet they don't end up with egg on their faces.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Well, considering that 64bit windows won't install on 32bit hardware, I'd say it's a safe bet they'll either run Opterons or some EM64T-enabled intel thingy.
Yeah - nice to see Intel having to play catch-up with AMD for a change.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
You know, altavista.com, the one that worked for a few months and then got spammed into oblivion and has been fairly unusable ever since which is why everyone now uses Google?
I would never have described it as 'accurate'. The only reason it could possibly be seen to be accurate was because at one stage, there were no porn sites to spam the index with, so it *had* to return decent page by default - because that's all that was there.
Technically it's not _needed_, and I'm certainly not going to argue with that.
.dll files (even if some have .exe, .vxd and whatever extensions), just like most of Linux is .so files. If you don't actually run a GUI program, they won't even be loaded.
I hope you do realize, though, that it doesn't hurt either.
1. Any library which isn't actually used, isn't even loaded. Most of Windows is just
2. Any memory page which isn't actually used, can be swapped to disc and _stays_ swapped. I.e., if after painting the desktop you don't actually run a GUI program on it, all that code to paint combos and whatnot will not even be in RAM.
So not installing a GUI would help with... what? With the few K of RAM needed to paint the clock in the tray? (Or not even that if the taskbar is set to auto-hide.)
And as opposed to... what? A typical Sun Solaris (UNIX) server also has all the GUI libraries, just in case you need to run some X stuff on it over the network. We have admins doing that every day. And that too means that they're loaded in memory when you do run graphics stuff, they're unloaded when you don't. Just like on Windows, eh?
Basically what I'm saying is: before deciding that including something is dumb, please actually do an analysis, rather than just letting your ideals of perfection do the talking. You'd be surprised how much stuff may not be, technically speaking, optimal, but nevertheless is not a liability either. A lot of flame-wars could be avoided if people asked themselves "well, exactly how much does it hurt?" instead of "is it 100% perfect and 100% optimal?"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.