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."

Comments

It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers down?

[nmg196]

I almost can't believe what I'm seeing.... Maybe it's just a coincidence but I can't currently connect to MSN Messenger (Trillian crashes) AND I can't see www.microsoft.com or use Windows Update from here in the UK!

I can't imagine that Microsoft.com could get slashdotted, so maybe they're having some severe teething issues.

This doesn't bode well for the future of 64bit Windows computing :)

AMD?

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean that it is likely that Microsoft are running AMD chips in their servers?

AMD or INTEL?

[mwdmeyer]

Soo, are they running on the Opteron or the new Xeon?

from 250 to 25 servers

[diegocgteleline.es]

Apparently, the number of servers that run messenger went from 250 32-bit servers to 25 64-bit servers. Apparently it was due to a limit in the number of network connections in the 32-bit edition

What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?

Thank Microsoft for that, actually

[Moraelin]

Just as a piece of trivia: Intel did want to come up with its very own 64 bit extensions, but MS basically told it that it can't be arsed to support yet another different set of 64 bit instructions. So basically the choice Intel had was squarely (A) implement AMD's set that Microsoft supports, or (B) not have any 64 bit Windows support.

Re:A couple thousand servers...

[ScentCone]

I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load.

Pretty much of an apples/oranges problem there, though. Yes, a search is a search is a search... but there are very different things going on relative to MSN membership, Google AdSense ads, and so on. Very different back-end processes and business issues would completely eclipse, I suspect, discussions about the individual web servers' OS. IIS on Win2003 may not be every slashdotter's cup of tea, but it's not orders of magnitude different from other servers in its ability to serve up a page. It's all that other behind-the-scenes tomfoolerly that both sites are doing that are what really weigh them down and burn up the CPU cycles. It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).