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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
So does this mean that it is likely that Microsoft are running AMD chips in their servers?
could just be isp/routing issues.
Works for me, and i'm in the uk also.
Soo, are they running on the Opteron or the new Xeon?
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 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.
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!
"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.
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.
Untill you've had enough time to see how it performs for others you keep a system you know works.
MS built the system if they dont try it who else will?
Gatesy may be allot of things but if you can him stupid im guessing you spend allot of time wondering why your tallent and intelect has gone undiscovered all these years.
serenity now!
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:
... Lamborghini decided to get the engine of their next model be designed by kia
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.
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
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
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.
It's not well known, but the shine of the BSODs from this cluster is the real source of the Norther Lights! ;)
Agile Artisans
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.
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
No, actually. It is a 64bit extention to a 32bit extention to a 16bit extention to a 8bit extention to a 4 bit architecture. The Intel 4004 was actually the first one of this family. I guess you are too young to know.
Welcome to the group of sentient observers that have reflected upon this statement
It's called eating your own dogfood and I respect anyone willing to put their business on the line to prove their product works well. Time will tell if this pays off for Microsoft. But I'm sure you know better...
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.
Guys, just wait until Itanium is ready... This is just a 64bit extention to a 32bit extention to a 16 bit architecture...
Opteron actually IS a 64-bit extension to the x86 hell. Same instruction set - they just extended it to 64 bit, they didn't changed anything. The success of the x86-64 architecture is being just a "extension", making very easy for compilers, software developers etc. to switch to the "new" architecture. They only added 8 registers more to the typical 8 - PPC and almost every 64-bit cpu from the past decade has 32, in a 20 years timeframe (we'll be running software in x86-64 compatible CPUs just for compatibility all that time just like happened with 32-bit x86) and they won't be enought - just like today 8 are too few
Same crap. Itanium may not be great, but at least it has been built from scratch to be a real 64-bit CPU, I'd get a real 64-bit CPU anytime. The shiny x86-64 still runs the 20-years-old 16-bit ms-dos, and it's not by chance. They are damn fast just because of internal changes, not because it really is a "real 64 bit CPU"
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
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.
because i really need that 64bit 8gb ram to do my spreadsheets or write a letter in Word
Disable Clippy.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
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 ;-(
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
...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.
... 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.
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.
are you really that stupid? It's 30 million unique visitors a day... that doesn't mean it's not the same 30 million from the day before, it means they have 30 million UNIQUE visitors, versus 30 million HITS, half of which may have been from just 1 person. Welcome to teh intraweb, pleze enjoy ur stay keke!