Ok, to clear some things up.... I have a good friend who works at Hotmail as a Net Admin over there. We were both reading over these posts and I was listening to all the comments he had about it. Just to inform/. there are currently over 70 Million users with an estimated 110 Million accounts at hotmail. These fluctuate about 5-15 Million each day as the inactive ones are turned off. The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. My friend informs me that an estimated 75% of the Clusters are now running Win2K with IIS, as well as serving many of the DNS requests. Hotmail adds around 300,000 new accounts each day. They have to build new clusters as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. Yes the BSD and Win2K machines are working together. The hardest thing there is the actual conversion... it is a bit tricky I am sure. But they are all running quite well. From time to time you may see a delay in the response time... and yes you may even get errors... I would LOVE to find an Administer who can convert 4800 machines from one OS to another and have 0 down time. Yup Unix is great... serves a great purpose and does a great job with it. On the other hand so does the MS OS's... I work for an IT outsourcing company and would hate to think of Administering all of our clients if they were running Unix instead of Windows... Oh and at anytime Hotmail has 'Capacity' to run for a few days at the current load... meaning they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users... this has been the case for years... yes EVEN with BSD. So yeah BSD is nice... but seems like MS is doing a great job of using it's own products.
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Keep all the above comments in mind while posting a message of how slow Hotmail is....
Ok, to clear some things up.... I have a good friend who works at Hotmail as a Net Admin over there. We were both reading over these posts and I was listening to all the comments he had about it. Just to inform /. there are currently over 70 Million users with an estimated 110 Million accounts at hotmail. These fluctuate about 5-15 Million each day as the inactive ones are turned off. The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. My friend informs me that an estimated 75% of the Clusters are now running Win2K with IIS, as well as serving many of the DNS requests. Hotmail adds around 300,000 new accounts each day. They have to build new clusters as fast as they can to keep up with the demand. Yes the BSD and Win2K machines are working together. The hardest thing there is the actual conversion... it is a bit tricky I am sure. But they are all running quite well. From time to time you may see a delay in the response time... and yes you may even get errors... I would LOVE to find an Administer who can convert 4800 machines from one OS to another and have 0 down time. Yup Unix is great... serves a great purpose and does a great job with it. On the other hand so does the MS OS's... I work for an IT outsourcing company and would hate to think of Administering all of our clients if they were running Unix instead of Windows... Oh and at anytime Hotmail has 'Capacity' to run for a few days at the current load... meaning they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users... this has been the case for years... yes EVEN with BSD. So yeah BSD is nice... but seems like MS is doing a great job of using it's own products.