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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."
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
I guess Gates has found out the hard way that "640k should be enough for anyone" does not really scale very well to 70 million users.
Maybe that's why MSN Messenger has such frequent disconnection issues.
Also, do they have a dedicated team whose sole job it is to run round rebooting all the machines when they BSOD?
So does this mean that it is likely that Microsoft are running AMD chips in their servers?
(_ducks_)
could just be isp/routing issues.
Works for me, and i'm in the uk also.
Wee
Won't this create a nice set of backwards-incompatable software that won't run on 32 bit processors once people develop for XP64?
I mean really, microsoft this, linux that google this
WHERE IS THE MASTURBATION?
Soo, are they running on the Opteron or the new Xeon?
I can get to microsoft.com (I couldn't earlier) but MSN seems to still be having problems.
About time. We had a dual CPU 64-bit system back at school (between 1992-95) - some time during that time, the system was upgraded from quad 68030 to dual Risc4000 and later Risc4400 processors.
As usual Microsoft is ten years behind times.
It seems to be back now, but at the time I posted I couldn't see anything:
Tracing route to www.microsoft.com
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms neon.winchester.local [192.168.0.19]
(blah)
7 259 ms 264 ms 251 ms ten7-2.paix-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.37.26]
8 484 ms 263 ms 371 ms ten8-3.bay-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.63.74]
9 259 ms 267 ms 256 ms po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138]
10 po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138] reports: Destination net unreachable.
The question i've got to ask myself is whether they are running the same server 2003 that one would get if you purchased a copy from them, because i for one can't imagine that using a version that they haven't tweaked to hell would be wise. Maybe there is a special internal version because otherwise they are either brave or stupid.
I was going to post that we only have Microsoft's word on this... what's to stop them from really running this MSN stuff on top of Linux and fudging the reply headers...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
because i really need that 64bit 8gb ram to do my spreadsheets or write a letter in Word
no wonder MS stock is falling
'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
It strikes me as being typical of Microsoft that they only see a 10 fold performance increase by exponentially increasing their processing power.
*cough* FreeBSD *cough* or was that a long time ago?
Out of interest, does anyone know how many unique visitors slashdot is currently getting per day? I think there's some figures tucked away in the info pages, but I remember them being rather out of date.
The indiscriminate use of vulgar language is the linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker
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...
Welcome Bill. You're now in Hell, over there is the fire. Don't play with it!
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.
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.
But hey it's not like there will be any bug fixs so even if MS does down permantly it won't matter
I like muppets.
...they voided the computers' warranties.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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?
MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows
:)
image a beowulf cluster of these
serenity now!
Apparently, Gates says that he can't find suitable workers in the U.S.A.
So, all you American IT types looking for work, Gates just insulted you...
Seems he wants to scrounge the world for the best worker bees that he can pay minimum wage to work in a programming sweatshop...
Sample article here: here
64 bit bighorn smash all other OSs including linux as the linux kernel is mere 16 bits and doesnt work properly.bighorns 64 bit powers are more stable than linux kerbel bugs because linux is buggy and unstable and not used much on computer.if you install 64 bit bighorn you will access more softwares and big media player like drm in bighorn is 64 bits to stop chinese linux hackers from taken machine with exploit.thx
"You only need to port what's necessary," he said. "If you've got a little graphic interface and it looks real pretty and it's 32-bit, that's fine - it'll run. But when you need the 32-bit addressing, the bigger data space, certainly port that into 64-bit."
s talksmuseum_1.html), InfoWorld magazine, October 2001
This reminds me of some other famous quotes:
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995) (http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html)
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that" Source: Speech at Computer History Museum (http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/01/HNgate
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"The 64-bit servers will demonstrate increased responsiveness in displaying the enhanced Stop Errors (aka BSOD). These new Stop Errors have been enhanced in two aspects:
1. The even more cryptic Stop Error Codes will increase Microsoft revenue by 38%, as even less people will have any idea what application has crashed and why, thereby increasing Technical Support calls.
2. We have implemented a different shade of blue associated with the Stop Errors. This will give give System Administrators a brief respite before they realize that their weekend and social life is utterly f*cked as result having to bring the servers back on-line."
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
But are all those systems actually running 64-bit hardware? If not, the announcement is pointless.
MS: "Yes, our brand new car has a beautiful high-tech hydrogen fuel cell in it!"
Driver: "But it's a diesel car..."
MS: "Well... yes.... it's actually just sitting in the back seat for now."
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The MS website seems fine now. This is about 13 minutes from your post. (Maybe they fixed it)
It's well known that Microsoft ROUTINELY eats its own shit in beta for a long time before a products is released.
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.
Maybe they've been slashdotted. :-)
The BSOD, coming to a screen near you !
just went to their web site to get some drivers for my cousin and it locked my machine - Of course I am using unbuntu and firefox -
funny thing is when I unplugged my network cable I got my mouse back and disconnected from their site -
seems everything works fine now but I sure hope they weren't trying to put sypware or root kit on my computer.
they will hear from if I find anything.
piss off microsoft - what are you now keeping people that don't run your os from your web site.
... Lamborghini decided to get the engine of their next model be designed by kia
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.
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.
The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.
Yeah..old one && offtopic, shame on me.
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.
Run windows, miss the BSOD, download the screensaver from sysinternals. It's dejavu all over again.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I hate to admit this on /., but I use Hotmail (I'm looking for some kind of 12 step program) and for the past few weeks it has really sucked. I don't know if using Netscape 7.2 is a factor, but I routinely see pages that won't load properly and must be reloaded. It also not unusual for the "empty junkmail" button to fail.
Guys, just wait until Itanium is ready... This is just a 64bit extention to a 32bit extention to a 16 bit architecture... Itanium is where its really at! If you have any kind of high end workload you need Itanium! x64 can't handle it! I promise! The sheep are lying!!!!!!!!!!
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
... welcome our new 64-bit microsoft webserver overlords.
oh. wait. no i don't. i never visit microsoft for any reason, whatsoever. stopped using their products, or even caring about them, or their technology, over 10 years ago.
linux rox. woot! osx too!! woot woot!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.heise.de/ct/motive/05/05/
This article should bave been filed under the who cares department.
Wait a week and we'll see what lies are spotted. It won't be the first time MS has made claims which are provably false.
And if they're true for once... Who cares. Microsoft using microsoft products doesn't remotely qualify as news.
Personally i can't believe Microsoft eats its own dog-food.
Just curious...how many apache servers would you need for microsoft.com?
Dang, where are the mod points when you need them?!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
What ever happened to Xenix? And why couldn't have just kept FreeBSD on the hotmail servers? They ended up plugging the *BSD TCP/IP stack into Windows anyway.
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms neon.winchester.local [192.168.0.19]
i now know ur IP adress, prepair 2 b h4x0red!
i will pwn ur hard drv!
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
The author should have added a direct link to Microsoft.com, so we could all click like sheeps (we all do it -- we just don't RTFA) and see if their new gear is slashdot-proof :P
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
I dunno, I think it's interesting. VMS and Unix aren't necessarily made for the same type of person. 64-bit Windows is a milestone considering it's basically a client operating system running on the server.
;)
Where I work, the sysadmins wouldn't have the first clue what to do with UNIX/Linux. That's not to say UNIX is bad or something, it's just to say the type of sysadmins my employer employs are in a different class than what Altavista likely has. We're a small municipality
Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts.
p /3434261
November 11, 2004 http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.ph
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.
microsoft:
micro-:
from greek mikros meaning small
soft:
probably from "software", soft + ware, perishable consumer goods
A good name after all!
makes sense either considering the OS or Bill's penis (taken more literally)
Wouldn't a move like this greatly help AMD's image?
;)
If its good enough for Microsoft, its good enough for us, right boss?
Never been much into stocks, but right about now something tells me to buy.
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
For the first time, I got a 503 error awhileago.
How does it compare to a fake quote? Well, nobody knows if Bill actually said that last quote, but it was attributed to him. I doubt Bill would admit he said that anyway, but there are more quotes we can read that are equally funny.
You say one is not forced to port everything, but I am willing to bet, soon you will be. You can run a Pentium computer with Windows 95 and surf the web, but why bother?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
According to the company, the Messenger servers handle about 70 million users.
I bet a good fraction of those 70 million hits are a result of the MSN messenger startup item opening up and immediately getting a right-click-system-tray->exit after a restart of windows.
Here in Poland M$ websites are inaccessible. I guess their 64bit Windows are crashing all the time due to /. effect. ;)
C'mon people let's do it once again! ]:->
Yes sounds like 64 bit is the future !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
I think it has more to do with windows server 2003.... it's sloooooowww.
We just got a new server and as a MSDN Subscriber, we get all the OSes. So we thought we would put Windows 2003 on it just because we could. Despite the fact that it's a BRAND NEW SERVER it's slow as a snail.
It seems as if Microsoft doesn't care at all about performance or expects everyone to jump on the 64bit bandwagon. Maybe we should have gotten Quad Xenons to get an acceptable level of performance.
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.
This should give MS scary nights. Really, I think Apple should release OS for intel chips too. This may help users with PCs run Tiger and give a good competetion for Windows.
MS transition to 64bit servers could signal the beginning of a planned shift and support of 64-bit computing, as outlined by Gates.
.Net. Converting a .Net application to 64-bits is just a matter of recompiling. So the real surge of 64-bit acceptance will happen once .Net Framework 64-bit is released Q4 2005. And looking a 2 years down the road, Longhorn will have a .Net API at its core.
.Net will drive future Windows sales. And it will be central to the shift to 64-bitness.
What really slowed the transition to 32-bit from 16-bit was the lack of 32-bit software. Porting was a nightmare then. But now, 90% of all newer business applications are written in
For those who have missed the agenda,
Geez, people don't do that now.
Imagine if you worked right down the hall from the folks who actually wrote that stuff.
"Hey Psiren, we just rolled a new SP. Wanna test it on your live servers?"
How dumb does waiting sound now?
My Trillian crashed this morning also, but since I do not have MSN active on it - it could just be Trillian. While I like this app, it is definitly flaky and has given me problems for a long long time - so I would not relate that to MSN servers.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Personally I consider unique on a month to month
basis.... Not unique from the day before LOL
I have no problems with the statistic: 30 million hits a day.
Nit picking? Yeah well.. what else is there to do in a towel while waiting for the kids bus to show up? LOL
Altavista may have had some nice functions, but Google returns much more useful results. There is a reason pretty much everyone stopped using Altavista you know.
It seems to be trendy on /. to bash Google these days, but people switched because it was the best overall. That seems to have forced Yahoo to improve as well.
I read that as...
When your brain makes that drastic a word change based on '-ed' you're either on Slashdot or missing a lot of caffeine.
Or both...
to remember.
It was super easy to find information. Yes...
I use Yahoo now because google has gone to shit
when you're looking for something specific.
That.... and I'm personally boycotting google due to
their shitty business ethics.
Yes.. google has some great stuff for the world.
Hitler did too.
Salesperson (SP): Here's your copy of "Windows Super Magic XP ME 06 Tournament Edition." How will you be paying for that?
Turn-X Alphonse (T-XA): Why, with fire of course. Do you have change for 800 infernos?
SP: Certainly. Here's your change: 23 flames and 82 sparks. Would you like our extended warranty?
T-XA: Uhmmm...how much is that?
SP: Just your soul.
T-XA: Sorry, I can't afford that. I used that to buy "Milli Vanilli's Greates Hits."
Yea well it may be able to handle 70 million, but can it handle the /. users?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Your 12-step program is called "a Gmail invite" ;).
Only a retard would upgrade all the workstations in
an office without some way of booting into the old
environment. He means it's better to wait and see
what horrible fuckups M$ made that cost OTHER people
money when they upgrade THEIR systems, before YOU upgrade your OWN machines.
Does any one know the approximate licence costs if this was paid for the 'thousands' of servers they use? If google 'paid' this cost would they still be in business? I'll bet it's a scary number ;-(
Goto www.microsoft.com
click "Careers" in the bottom.
I got the errorpage 2/3 times I clicked...
Divine intervention telling me not to work for MS.
I have said it before I will say it again. The ignorance of some /.ers regarding Windows networking is startling. Hey, you do not like MSFT? Fine. But at least know what you are talking about.
I must be some magician running a 500 person shop running XP on the desktop connecting to Windows servers. According to some in this group, this is not possible. I cannot remember the last time I saw a bluescreen on the desktop. It has been at least a year since I have experience one on my 20 Win2K servers which run email, webservers, and other assorted applications. The supposed nightmare of updating Windows with patches and hotfixes could not be more simple.
Viruses, spyware? They are controlled and pose a very small problem. Antivirus on the desktop coupled with a firewall on the perimeter. Until last week we were not even running SP2 on the desktop.
Of course, I am simply stating the obvious considering that the vast majority of corporations run Windows on the desktop and have Windows servers in the datacenter. Windows simpy works.
It is just that reading some of the comments on this website can be surreal experience.
Have you guys ever heard of AD, Group Policies, Windows scripting, Windows Resource Kit? If you suspect you have a tool missing, check the Resource Kit. Yes, I know it should be in the base OS, but whatever.
Maybe there's a security hole. Try hacking in. Microsoft's IP address is 127.0.0.1...hehe :)
It's all very well the OS running in 64bit mode, but are the apps running in 64bit mode as well or is the shiny new OS running the old 32bit applications?
The original assertion is true. Altavista the the default search engine around 97-99 or so. Google's becomming less and less usefull each day. Far too many of the results are dominated by spammers of one sort or another.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
I think that question should be turned around and asked to you.
Altavista, for years, was altavista.digital.com and was the best search engine on the internet. altavista.com pointed to some other company that enjoyed tons of free publicity from people typing in the wrong thing. Later on, digital spun off the search engine (I think it was around the time of the Compaq sale), the new company bought the altavista.com domain name, and slowly turned to crap.
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
Even if all 7 billion people on earth had their own computer with unique IP, 30 million unique users a day would mean that it would only be 233.33333 days before everyone on earth viewed their crappy site.
30 million unique users a month I could maybe believe.
I love it how MS always leaves out the important bits.
Microsoft uses Akamai to serve the majority of their content. So while the html may be coming from MS, everything else comes from Akamai. Akamai use their own linux-based platform to run their servers. A simple traceroute to i.microsoft.com ends up (for me) at 203-59-140-12.deploy.akamaitechnologies.net
Then again... why let the facts get in the way of good marketing.
Kudos to MS.
The only thing that doesn't run Windows in the MSN datacenters is Hotmail, and some of the Vicinity stuff.
Microsoft.com IS on 64-bit, I built a good portion of them myself.
So Microsoft is serving every person in the entire world within a mere 233.333 days? (7 billion divided by 30 million equals 233.333)
I hate that silly "unique visitors" statistic that companies with a web presence love to throw around. Who gives a flying F if you've had 30 million "unique visitors" because your servers are being bombarded with faked TCP header info by spammers every damn day?!
I would start using it, if it offered better searches for the person who didn't just want to know who got linked to the most from outside. Where is the indication of what they think is "at least as good"? Two very different approaches, instead of two that can be spammed using the same technique, would be refreshing. FWIW, the "near me" button is nothing like the "near" capabiliity allowing the nearness of one keyword to another to be specified for a match (Altavista seems to have lost this and many other capabilities once Yahoo bought them out).
...for a company to "eat it's own dog food". Unfortunately in the case of MS, its software truly IS a "dog's breakfast".
It does seem to me that the performance (or lack thereof) of MSN Messenger and related properties points to teething pains in the upgrade process. It happens quite often that you cannot sign in to Messenger or hotmail for brief periods and on some occasions you get punted. From what I have seen the problem is quite intermittent--can't sign in? Wait 15 minutes. It doesn't seem to be related to ISPs either--two people in the same area of the city with the same ISP will report different results.
Maybe it is just my experience, but I have found the problems are more likely associated with the sign-in process. I've only tried this once but it DID happen: Girlfriend couldn't sign into MSN from her place on cable internet. I COULD sign into MSN at my place (ADSL which surprisingly works faster than her cable most of the time). Though it might be a problem with the cable ISP, so tried to sign in under HER account at MY place. It did NOT work using HER account on either machine from two different ISPs, BUT...MY sign-in worked form BOTH places.
If someone has ready access to different machines on different connections and has problems signing into MSN, you might wat to try ths out and see if it was a fluke or if it really IS a problem linked to the user. My theory is that some of the problems are related to MS systems relying on a some kind of distributed database of user credentials, and that in the process of "improving" things with 64-bit systems that sections of this database drop out from time to time.
It's all great and wonderful that MS wants to stay cutting edge and maintain capacity to handle their huge demand, but how they seem to go about it really irritates me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! It's like their upgrades are often a massive, disruptive undertaking. Can they not roll this stuff out more gradually--like over a couple of years instead of a few problem-plagued weeks and months?
The frustrating part is that even paying users are subjected to some of these problems--so much for getting what you pay for. Even my free Yahoo account seems to be more reliable these days.
When my wife had a similar experience at a chip company.
The chip was flakey - but fast. The company wanted to ship it anyhow rather than fix it. Management argued that customers would buy it because nothing could beat its speed. She pointed out that a shorter mean time to crash was a bug, not a feature.
Management won. Of course.
And the company went down. Of course.
Yet another corporate corpse in the rubish heaps of Silicon Valley.
What drives me NUTS is that management KEEPS DOING THAT out here. They get focused on staying ahead of the curve and let quality slide. Then the company dies. Then they get a higher-paid position at another one and do it again. (Venture capaitalists apparently value experience over ability. Perhaps they believe that "expertese is directly proportional to value of equipment destroyed while learning" applies to corporate management.)
And when called on it they point to Microsoft, which has its customers so locked in that they keep getting away with it.
My hope is that Microsoft's continued existence is just a matter of dinosaurs (like other large reptiles) taking a long time to die. B-)
Maybe this will help them along.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So they are migrating their x86 machines to x64? Sounds like a downgrade to me. Not that this is anything new for MS...
Razorback 2, the eDonkey2000 server, handles over 1,000,000 sockets. That makes the kernel take 5GBs of RAM, and the server itself 7GBs (of couse needs 64 bit arch).
Windows 2000/XP and perhaps 2003 is crippled by its limited non-paged pool where the TCP stack places its structures. In XP, I think the limit was 256MBs, but on my 512MB machine, it won't grow higher than 128MBs. At 5KB per socket (the same as in Linux above), that's 25,000 sockets. Max I've ever tested was 5,000 and non-paged pool was already 80MBs though.
I've heard they reworked some stuff in WS2003, and of couse 64 bit editions have much higher limits.
I haven't look at the current linux kernel closely, but if the networking-related data structures are put into low memory (i.e. memory below one or a few gigabytes) on 32-bit architectures, you would run out of low memory with too many connections. That's if the connection count isn't limited by some other (sometimes artificial) factor. I guess Windows on 32-bit architectures have similar problems.
at one stage, there were no porn sites
what did people do back then grandpa?
Altavista may have had some nice functions, but Google returns much more useful results. There is a reason pretty much everyone stopped using Altavista you know. For you, perhaps. Especially for those without a clue how to really search, so the best they can hope for is the most-popular thing that the most other sites are linking to.
But then please don't go complaining about spam when you are not willing to use or have available a more-intelligent search capability to find exactly what you are after.
What you wind up with is only good for advertisers and manipulators.
It seems to be trendy on /. to bash Google these days if there were any real criticism, maybe they would be motivated. What I see is a community that believes they can do no wrong and Oohs and Ahhs about non-innovations like web-based email and public text projects subverted to their commercial purposes. How about improving search?
people switched because it was the best overall. That seems to have forced Yahoo to improve as well.
Your world must be extremely one-dimensional to believe, in Panglossian fashion, that "best overall" is even a definable metric, or that it will naturally arise from the marketplace.
We are far better served by numerous independent innovators which we had at least to some degree until AltaVista was repeatedly sold and repeatedly downgraded their capabilities. If the best business business model is for them to show you what they and their advertisers want you to see, combined with the 1% most-popular that rises to the top by counting links, how is that better in any sense? Intelligent people are usually looking for needles in haystacks, not for the dross that rises to the top or could have been found by guessing domain names.
Even now, AltaVista frequently will give me much that I cannot get from Google, and I would even call "dogpile.com" a much greater and more-useful innovation than Google ever offered (beyond their first idea that searching was a popularity contest, which is sometimes true for the masses), drawing and combining results from different search engines to avoid the single Google slant.
Does anyone have a copy of their "what we're running" page? I remember reading a fairly detailed description of the hardware they had, but for some reason the number 10GB of RAM is stuck in my head.. That was a crapload back then, now not so much. In 5 years MSI/Nvidia will have a 10GB video card.
I'd forgotten that it used to be altavista.digital.com... But I'm pretty sure back then (ooh 1996-1999ish) I never thought it was that good. Oh well.
'Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,' a spokesperson said.
A million flies can't be wrong: eat shit.
The MSN Search machines (at least at the data center down this direction... had a recent contract there) - all nice dual processor, ultra scsi Rackable Systems boxes.
Let me tell you, the blinkylite count was off the chart, and it was even better once we found the light switches in the data center!
(Yes, I'm serious..)
Hey, it's Microsoft, okay? They'll tell us any bit of "good news" just to sell another copy of XP.
Now move along people...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
... it's because there doesn't seem to be any decent anti-virus software for 64 bit Microsoft Windows?
I sure as hell wouldn't put a Microsoft Windows machine live without any... not and expect it to last very long.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
No the older one at av.digital.com or whatever it was wayback when. That one actually had results.
Altavista was "good" back then because it returned a *lot* of results, not because it had a decent ranking function.
Compared to Yahoo of the day, the index was several times larger, and was auto-generated, so it was fresher.
The ranking function, however, sucked, which is why it got replaced by more modern search engines in the market.
Do they run Linux?
I wonder how much Microsoft even bothers to optimize for the different exstension such as SSE and 3DNow, I imagine they don't do much at all.
I've often wondered the same thing when I read platform reviews at Toms/Anandtech/SharkyExtreme/etc.
AMD almost always blows away Intel on integer/database stuff [e.g. the kinds of things that you would do with something like the Standard Template Library], and also on most scientific packages [which, in theory, ought to be heavily multi-threaded].
But then Intel will pull even or maybe slightly ahead on graphics stuff, which I imagine to be heavily biased towards SSE. Of course, in the past, it also helped Intel to have a faster memory pipeline [but now that HyperTranpsort is maturing, that's no longer the case].
PS: What I wanna see is a motherboard with a really good HyperTransport to PCI Express x16 bridge, and like a gazillion fully switched slots. It'll be like having your own $1 million Juniper Systems backplane for the price of an XBox.
So does this mean that Microsoft is only using AMD processors for the upgraded systems?
what do you have in those things? I have several 2003 servers and they work pretty snappily. I have an exchange cluster on dual opteron 2U boxes (240x2) with 1GB RAM in each (small number of users, don't complain about how much RAM I have, I had to keep it under budget). They work damn fast and keep everyone happy :).
All in all, the VC version is 50% larger both in instruction count and code size than the optimal (99% of the time) code.
What are the performance differences?
So, now that Windows 64-bit is out why don't they make some products that would actually work on it?
As you can see from here there's no real plan to have a 64-bit version of Exchange, yet would this not be a perfect solution to use it with?
Important
Exchange 2003 is supported on 32-bit operating systems and hardware. Exchange 2003 is not supported on 64-bit operating systems, 64-bit hardware, or 32-bit emulators running on 64-bit operating systems.
Here's the link here.
Check out Mon and Mon.cgi
This was mentioned at Winhec, MSN search was not ported to 64 bit but was developed on 64 from the begining
The hotmail servers were migrated to Windows years ago. None of them are running on a non MS platform.
Am I wrong or wasn't that because they were embarassed by the revelation that Akamai was using Linux servers to serve their pages?
I vaguely remember a headline that said "Microsoft protected by the penguin!"
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Accordng to tests I've read, SUSE Linux would be about twice as fast - on 32-bit anyway.
Microsoft's problem is that their server OSes simply don't scale well, which means more servers, which means more failures on average.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
My Geo metro is down to 2 cylinders (Still gets up to 70 mph as fast any anyone else, but mostly because people have no clue that you can accelerate in the acceleration lane), and some day it will die. I'd love to replace it with a diesel.
Currently VW's TDI looks good, but it is way over powered. (I drive 100+ miles/day) I need gas milage, power doesn't impress me anymore.
But remote administration with a GUI only requires a GUI on the client box - the server can be completely headless, GUI-less and cruft-free and the admin (on the client) can use whatever happens to be appropriate to manage that machine.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"I think it has more to do with windows server 2003.... it's sloooooowww."
If Server 2003 is running slow on your machine, you must have a driver or application problem.
I'm running Server 2003 at home on a P3-600MHz with 512MB RAM and it's performing great. It's running as an AD domain controller, DNS/DHCP server, file server, ftp, http, etc. I even have my bittorrent client running on that box 24/7. I haven't had a single performance problem or crash, not even one, in the 18 months it's been running.
At work I've put W2K3 on machines with Quad 2.7GHz Xeons (not Xenons as you put it), with 4GB of RAM, and it SMOKES.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
SUSE would run MS Exchange twice as fast? That's something I'd like to see... :p
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
While the OP does sound a bit trollish ("Google who can't figure out... even as good a search as their competitors..."), there are some valid points to be had here.
The reason I (and many others, I'm sure) switched from Alta Vista to Google was that Google consistently returned the results I wanted when given a simple query. AV would generally require me to build a relatively complicated expression (often in several iterations) to get good results. Google just needed a word or two. Google's idea of using links to rate page's value ("PageRank") was a brilliant innovation.
Google is still on track in many ways. You'll notice a lot of their recent features can be described as "figuring out what you want", rather then you *telling* Google want you want. That is, if you enter a street address, it gives you a map. If you enter a person's name and town, it gives you their phone book entry. This is a subtle but very powerful and innovative idea. Most systems make you tell the computer what you want. Even if it's a well-designed UI, you're still picking things from drop-down lists and what have you. Google just has a free-form text-entry field, and figures it out. No syntax. No UI other then the English language. Brilliant.
A lot of Google is also just using the web really well. Look at their recent maps system. Maps have been done before by just about everybody, but nobody had come close to doing it as well as Google. That's not so much innovation as just knowing how to wring every ounce of power out of the popular web browsers and JavaScript, but it still counts as progress.
(Geez, I'm starting to sound like a Microsoft press release with all this "innovation" crap. But I believe it's actually true in this case.)
However, despite all this sycophanthy, I think that Google does have serious room for improvement. For one, the OP is right that search engine spam is starting to seriously diminish the value of Google. That's largely a consequence of success. Just like all the viruses target Windoze because that's where the targets are, SEO's target Google. However, Google still needs to do something about it, or Google will continue to loose value. (Same with Microsoft and the virus problem, incidentally.)
Most of the spam on Google is very obvious. It all looks the same, even in the subject lines. One of the things Google does so well is recognize the same kinds of patterns that humans do. So why can't they introduce some heuristics to filter out sites that are selling things? Make it an option, even, so that people can choose. That will even make a lot of the SEO's happier, as they 'll get people who are interest in buying stuff, and not hits from people who don't want their crap.
The search engine spam problem is doubly-bad with Google because of the fact that their UI is so simple. With Altavista, it might take a more complex query, but at least I had the option. With Google, I often lack the tools (query syntax) needed to refine my search and filter out the spam. Lately I've found myself wishing for the power of Altavista's syntax combined with the human-language intelligence of Google.
I don't want Google to become the Novell of the search engine world. Novell, you may recall, had an innovative, unique, and well-done product (NetWare) when they first started to succeed back in the early 1990s. And the early 1990s is right where Novell and NetWare stayed for at least a decade, while everyone else caught up and then passed them.
It would be a shame for the same thing to happen to Google.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This did not happen overnight. The version they are running is probably older than the released version.
Of course running it on their servers only exercises a small portion of the code, and with an extremely limited set of drivers.
"They just randomly lock up or reboot at various times. These are office machines, not gaming rigs. The one that is giving me fits right now is a fresh install of XP Pro with updates, not a bit of spyware."
Well, something must be wrong with your setup, because I sure don't have that problem. As much as I hate to say it, when properly administered, on reliable hardware, the Windows XP OS itself is pretty stable.
My job includes the care and feeding of about 50 Windoze workstations. The only time I've seen those kinds of problems has been due to either a hardware fault or bad layered software that was installed. The OS itself is stable.
Of course, this is a strongly managed environment. Users don't have any admin or power rights to their computers; we filter anything that even looks like it might be a virus on before it gets near the users; we filter email and web access; web access is through an authenticated proxy server; we test software before it is installed; etc, etc. We do our homework and then some. We also only buy unexciting computers from trustworthy name-brand vendors; no whiteboxes. Because of that, the OS is stable.
Applications still suck. MS Office seems to find a new way to drive me crazy every day, and our ERP system is clunkier then a cement truck on a race track. But the OS itself is stable and confines the damage to individual applications. For what that's worth.
This ain't cheap. Windows costs way more to do right then other OSes, no doubt about it. But it can be done.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Here's for you :
GMail invite
That's the Enterprise Engineering Center.
The Enterprise Engineering Center is an internal lab, not a deployment environment. The primary purpose of that lab is to allow select customers to visit and test Microsoft apps in a realistic deployment scenario similar to their own, with representatives of product teams available on hand to help iron out any deployment or functional issues.
From the picture, my best guess is that it was taken when Sun was visiting to work on interoperability scenarios there.
I'm not saying they didn't buy that equipment to use in their farms - just that this is not the picture to prove it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
In general, AddRef/Release are not horribly high frequency call.
Granted, the timing difference might be imperceptible for single iterations, but if you stick the things in big "for" loops, and run them a million [or a billion] times, you ought to be able to get a sense of just how much quicker your code is:
Do that for both your code and Microsoft's, and you can get a little sense of how much faster yours is.The reason I (and many others, I'm sure) switched from Alta Vista to Google was that Google consistently returned the results I wanted when given a simple query. AV would generally require me to build a relatively complicated expression (often in several iterations) to get good results. Google just needed a word or two. Google's idea of using links to rate page's value ("PageRank") was a brilliant innovation.
I use Google today as much as the next person for simple queries where I want to be advertised to or there is one quite-public company to be found
The statement "and many others, I'm sure" is vague enough to fit almost any possible set of circumstances, even if it were only a fraction of a percent of those who switched and never go back. It may have been the reason for many who never figured out the value of an accurate powerful search capability. But it completely neglects another reason for those who did value the capabilities:
Altavista discontinued almost every capability that made them such a good search engine, and it has been many years since I could recommend them on any basis to anyone except just as an alternative that will give a different set of results. It seems that Google is perhaps: not willing, not able, or not aware of the value of a better search capability for power users. Are they afraid their advertisers won't rise to the top? Is there any other alternative I missed? None of them are things I would like to believe about Google which has many positives as a company, but where's the state-of-the-art technology when we need something besides a website popularity contest?
Perhaps I sound trollish, because I have taken the time to describe things politely and repeatedly in great depth for Google for many years and have never even receive an acknowledgement that there is anyone who thinks this sort of thing would be valuable. This feels like an attitude of "We're Google and you are not", rather than of community -- the same silent treatment I got from AltaVista as they made themselves less and less valuable and I let them know about it, asking for them to restore features. Thus, Google deserves to lose market share, as Altavista did, to anyone who does something better for a significant portion of users who are not being well-served now, in which I include myself. There is so much more that could be done.
I have no real desire for Microsoft to succeed in this area because I do not trust them with the power they have now. If they serve to jog Google into action that benefits me with the basic ability to search the internet better, then they served a useful function. If they are trying hardest just to be another Google, then ultimately it probably doesn't matter too much which one is declared winner.
Completely coincidence that you are having issues at the same time the article was released.
;)
Migrations actually started quite awhile back, there was no "okay, the press release is going live in 15 minutes does everyone in the datacenter have their hands on power switches so we can flip everything over at the same time?"
Drug induced raving (oops, I mean 'Quote'):
t +in+2006/2100-1012_3-5647236.html
As you can see from here there's no real plan to have a 64-bit version of Exchange, yet would this not be a perfect solution to use it with?
Public discussion of announced 64-b Exchange Server, features, and schedule:
http://news.com.com/New+Microsoft+Exchange+due+ou
Idiot
Actually, they're not "damn fast." And that is part of the problem. If they WERE "damn fast" and ready to ship, Microsoft's large-scale 64-bit server deployment would probably be using at least some of them.
Have you actually used any Itanium systems? I've been using prototypes, as well as new production Itanium2's, for more than two years now. They are only perf-competitive in a few areas, and that's certainly not enough to justify their lack of all backwards compatibility. The beauty of AMD64 is the ability to run 32-bit code natively in the same OS environment. It's great stuff, and it's what made the 16 to 32-bit transition so painless and such a huge success back in the Win95 days.
Never underestimate seamless backwards-compatibility.
Upgrade your Trillian ... a bugfix for MSN was released yesterday.
I would buy karma from ebay but I'm not sure I can trust the seller.
It will run Novell's Exchange equivalent - or one of the several other Exchange equivalents presently available.
Do keep up with the news.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm coming in late to this thread, but here's the HUGE reason companies are going to have for moving specific systems to 64bit - memory. Windows has been bottlenecked from a scalability perspective for awhile now with the way it addresses memory, making it rely on disk subsystems (which compared to processor power and RAM speeds, are ridiculously slow).
; en-us;294418
Check this URL out, then think about big database servers or other memory intensive apps running on 64bit vs 32bit.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
(BTW - who knew "hyperspace" as an "Architectural component" on Windows??!)
Not redundant: please note title "Not in the article". MM'ed "unfair".