Apparently David Filo has been asked this question quite a few times, and a few people asked him at ApacheCon last year. He says he went with FreeBSD because it was free and stable, and at the time Linux was not (stable). At this point in time I haven't seen Linux stand up to the serious loads I've put it up against. I've talked with people at Hotmail who tried it as a lark, they said the Linux boxes failed within 2 minutes of being up. I tried this at MSN-Linkexchange as well and got similar results. Linux just didn't seem to stand up to the pounding of big site webtraffic.
On a side note, www.pootpoot.com has been/.'ed a few times and has not fallen to any ill effects. It only runs into issues of it not being on a very high bandwidth link (ADSL).
I don't think Exchange can handle 50M users, much less all of them trying to login at the same time like Hotmail can. In fact my Exchange server can barely handle just having 100 users, and its a Quad Xeon-450... Its always going down, and its mail database system always gets screwed up when the damn thing crashes. Having mail in an internal database is pretty lame, I could understand if they used SQL-Server for the DB, but they don't.
Sorry, as an MSN employee, I must clear this up. Hotmail started out with FreeBSD as the front door and Solaris as the backend. There are about 2000-3000 machines all running FreeBSD at Hotmail. MS tried to use MS-Proxy in front of the FreeBSD boxes, and ended up dying pretty badly. Hotmail is pushing the envelope on the capabilities of the hardwares and OS'es it runs, so I don't think you'll see NT there in the next 2-3 years. What was cracked was the Passport authentication scheme.
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Apparently David Filo has been asked this question quite a few times, and a few people asked him at ApacheCon last year. He says he went with FreeBSD because it was free and stable, and at the time Linux was not (stable). At this point in time I haven't seen Linux stand up to the serious loads I've put it up against. I've talked with people at Hotmail who tried it as a lark, they said the Linux boxes failed within 2 minutes of being up.
/.'ed a few times and has not fallen to any ill effects. It only runs into issues of it not being on a very high bandwidth link (ADSL).
I tried this at MSN-Linkexchange as well and got similar results. Linux just didn't seem to stand up to the pounding of big site webtraffic.
On a side note, www.pootpoot.com has been
Actually it was OpenBSD.
http://www.softrare.com/openbsd-sh4/
I don't think Exchange can handle 50M users, much less all of them trying to login at the same time like Hotmail can. In fact my Exchange server can barely handle just having 100 users, and its a Quad Xeon-450... Its always going down, and its mail database system always gets screwed up when the damn thing crashes. Having mail in an internal database is pretty lame, I could understand if they used SQL-Server for the DB, but they don't.
Sorry, as an MSN employee, I must clear this up.
Hotmail started out with FreeBSD as the front door and Solaris as the backend. There are about 2000-3000 machines all running FreeBSD at Hotmail.
MS tried to use MS-Proxy in front of the FreeBSD boxes, and ended up dying pretty badly. Hotmail is pushing the envelope on the capabilities of the hardwares and OS'es it runs, so I don't think you'll see NT there in the next 2-3 years.
What was cracked was the Passport authentication scheme.