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What tools and technologies are used to build the Stack Exchange Network?

See also: Which tools and technologies are used to build Data Explorer?

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Core

Stack Overflow uses a WISC stack via BizSpark (we graduated!):

Software Development Tools

External Bits

Code used in Stack Overflow that is not included as part of the development tools:

Miscellaneous

Content

Hardware

  • 11 Dell R640 IIS web servers (9 shared for all production like SO, two for Meta and development):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Processor Gold 6226 @ 2.7 GHz 12 Core with 24 threads
    • 96 GB RAM
    • Windows Server 2019
    • Two drives
      • 2 Toshiba 480GB SAS SSD (RAID 1)
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • Three Dell R720xd database servers (two in New York City, one in Denver, using SQL AlwaysOn Clustering) (Global "Sites" DB & Stack Overflow dedicated):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680 @ 2.7 GHz
    • 384 GB RAM
    • 21 drives
      • Mirrored Pair for OS
      • 2 Intel P3700 2TB PCIe NVMe RAID1 for databases
      • 24 Intel 710 200GB SSD RAID10 for databases
    • SQL Server 2014 SP1
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • Three Dell R730 database servers (two in New York City, one in Denver, using SQL AlwaysOn Clustering) (All other sites, Careers, Area 51, etc.):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Processor X5680 @ 3.33 GHz
    • 768 GB RAM
    • 28 drives
      • Mirrored Pair for OS
      • 2 Intel P3700 2TB PCIe NVMe RAID0 for databases
      • 24 1.2TB 10K RAID10 for large databases
    • SQL Server 2014 SP1
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • Two Dell R640 HAProxy servers (direct):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Gold 5218 @ 2.3 GHz
    • 96 GB RAM
    • CentOS 7
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming (internal)
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming (external)
  • Two Dell R640 HAProxy servers (Fastly):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Gold 5218 @ 2.3 GHz
    • 96 GB RAM
    • CentOS 7
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming (internal)
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming (external)
  • 2 Dell R640 Redis servers:
    • 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6244 @ 3.6 GHz
    • 384 GB RAM
    • CentOS 7
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • Three Dell R640 Service servers for tag engine/search:
    • 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6244 @ 3.6 GHz
    • 96 GB RAM
  • One Dell R620 Backup server running NetBackup (most backups):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Processor E52620 @ 2.0 GHz
    • 16 GB RAM
    • 14 drives
      • Mirrored Pair for OS
      • 12 4TB 10K RPM RAID10 for backups (DAS)
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • One Dell R730xd SMB3 Backup server (SQL backups):
    • 2x Intel Xeon Processor E5-2623v3 @ 3.0 GHz
    • 16 GB RAM
    • 30 drives
      • Mirrored Pair for OS
      • 16 6TB 7.2K RPM RAID10 for backups (Internal)
      • 12 4TB 10K RPM RAID10 for backups (DAS)
    • 2x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming
  • Six Dell R640 VMWare ESX servers:
    • 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6240 @ 2.60 GHz
    • 1.5 TB RAM
    • 16x 10 Gbit/s NIC teaming (8x 10 Gbit/s per FX2s)
  • 2 Cisco ASR1001-X routers
  • 2 ASR1001 Routers
  • 2 Fortinet 1100E Firewalls
  • 2 Cisco Nexus 5596 Cores in an active/active redundant configuration

Sources:

  1. Stack Overflow's New York Data Center (Server Fault Blog)
  2. Designing for Scalability of Management and Fault Tolerance (Server Fault Blog)
  3. What Was Stack Overflow Built With?
  4. Stack Overflow Server Glamour Shots
  5. Technology and SEO profile for stackoverflow.com
  6. Stack Overflow and DVCS
  7. Stack Overflow Network Configuration
  8. https://stackexchange.com/performance
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  • 41
    Hmmm, the list seems incomplete. I don't see Unicornify in there...
    – Lunatik
    May 6, 2010 at 7:10
  • 7
    I love how people are so into bc3 that they it is listed as part of the stack
    – user145917
    Sep 20, 2010 at 12:35
  • 5
    Can I ask how on earth the SO team managed to update the site to user Razor so quickly? Did they actually port older aspx views into razor or are legacy pages running with razor side-by-side?
    – gideon
    Apr 2, 2011 at 9:50
  • What is the platform/code that the blog is run on? I've posted a question on this already.
    – casperOne
    Jun 6, 2011 at 0:14
  • 40
    How StackOverflow Earns Revenue?
    – Purushoth
    Aug 19, 2013 at 13:00
  • Probably should include this one as well meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216324/…
    – Templar
    Jul 3, 2014 at 18:00
  • I see VMWare in there somewhere, but could you please elaborate which systems are Bare Metal and which are running under virtualization, perhaps Hyper-V?
    – Jason Caldwell
    Jul 23, 2014 at 0:11
  • 1
    What IoC Container is used by StackOverflow?
    – Billa
    Jul 28, 2014 at 15:34
  • 11
    I have to say I was surprised to see this level of technical detail made public. I'm not sure how common this is, but my gut tells me that security pedants wouldn't be overjoyed by it. That is, purely theoretically, a malicious party might be able to narrow the space of attack options based on the level of details here. Just my two cents.
    – sammy34
    May 30, 2015 at 14:48
  • What about the ads management system ?
    – Tech Support
    Jul 25, 2015 at 18:41
  • 1
    Is api.stackexchange.com included here?
    – Some Helpful Commenter
    Feb 4, 2016 at 22:00
  • 1
    "Microsoft Windows Server 2017 x64" - What? Did MS release a special version of Windows Server between 2016 and 2019 exclusively for Stack's use?
    – jmbpiano
    Apr 18, 2019 at 15:36
  • 3
    This answer needs two updates: 1. We're switching to CommonMark, but they still use MarkdownSharp and PageDown to some extent for special features; don’t know how much into detail this post should go. 2. An Update On Creative Commons Licensing; they don’t use CC BY-SA 4.0 for all the content. They use 2.5, 3.0, and 4.0.
    – Sebastian Simon
    Jun 25, 2020 at 2:02
  • 2
    The answer is quite old it seems. Has it been updated?
    – Manu Chadha
    Oct 6, 2020 at 5:39
  • 2
    What is used on the front-end? Only jQuery? Also, why such an old version of jQuery?
    – IvanD
    Dec 28, 2020 at 0:16

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