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eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers
molo writes "According to Nils Lohner of the Debian press team, eBay and Workspot have chosen Debian with Apache and Perl for their wireless servers. Workspot also explains their reasons and their setup. "
I started noticing that major companies like Amazon.com and ebay started switching some of their servers to apache after microsoft released their pricing scheme for Win2k. I'm not sure if these large e-commerce sites really want to pay thousands of dollars in licensing for each server for the win2k upgrades. I'm sure they don't also want to pay that $1000+ license for having a "largish" web site per server. I think win2k will be the downfall of microsoft.
hi. this was not an official ebay announcement. word got out because we thanked the engineers at debian. which we do gratefully. we're a debian gnu/linux shop, who happen to work with ebay. the use of free software, the best stuff in our opinion, was OUR decision, not ebay's. cheers -- workspot
Hey now! I'm as Gnu/Linux'y as the next /.'er, but at least I'll have the guts to say that Sun makes a good product. The OS may be slower than some others, but it's solid, stable, and not buggy in the least. The hardware, with a few exceptions (Cough.. HME.. Cough..) is also quite good. As for the Sun scalability issue, it scales well. (I won't go so far to say it scales better than Linux, because I don't have my asbestos long-johns with me).
Do you have some sort of inherent grudge against Oracle? Oracle is slower than many other DB's, but it is by design. Oracle takes great lengths to make everything is pristine; it is one of the factors one considers when selecting a DB.
.sig: Now legally binding!
--Cut to a smoke filled room....
We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.
But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!
I've seen several notes which mention Ebay's instability problems and the use of Solaris/Oracle on Ebay. There is no doubt the database servers are very critical, but it looks like the application logic itself runs on NT & IIS. I had my own share of frustration with Ebay services in the past, and I believe the database was not to blame. Look at this URL:
& item=555555555
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem
(I made the item number up, but this is the correct form of URL to look up an item)
I know most server-side programming techniques allow aliases for server side apps/objects (i.e. I can write a Java servlet and call it "whateverISAPI.dll"), but the URL suggests that Ebay application logic is nothing but a bunch of ISAPI DLLs written for use with IIS. I would guess Ebay applications are written as ISAPI filters using MS Visual C++, and run on MS Windows NT servers running IIS. Or they have a really good reason to use another technology and call the program "ebayISAPI.dll".
Does anyone here know what Ebay runs on? Can anyone verify my guess, which I believe is pretty obvious to many Slashdotters.
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