Big name web sites and the platforms they run on (was: Skype and Asterisk)

[Ben Scott]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> I'm told eBay runs on Linux.

  My information is a few years out of date, but circa 2000, eBay's
front-end web servers was a Windows cluster, running IIS.  (At one
time, it was the largest production IIS cluster in the world, I
believe.)  If headers and URLs are anything to go by, they're
currently running a mix of IIS 5.0 and Apache Tomcat/Coyete, depending
on which part of the site you're using.  No idea what OS Tomcat is
running on.  Back then, their backend database was Oracle running on a
Sun Enterprise 10000.  It was the Sun/Oracle system which kept failing
and bringing the whole site down.

  Everything Microsoft owns runs on Windows/IIS, of course.  They
knocked out Hotmail multiple times trying to bring it over from qmail
on BSD before they finally succeeded.

  Slashdot runs Linux for everything.

  Google is secretive, but reportedly runs on Linux, with lots of C
and Python code.  For hardware, chief concerns are purchase cost,
waste heat, and power consumption.  They handle redundancy at the
machine level, and don't worry abut making individual boxes last.

  Yahoo is a melting pot.  You can find just about everything,
including Perl, PHP, Python and LISP, running on Sun, BSD, Linux and
Windows.

  I believe Flickr runs on Linux and MySQL; dunno what language platform.

  Twitter runs on Ruby/Rails, MySQL, and Linux, and has had a rather
poor time scaling to handle growth, so I'm not sure we should be proud
of that.

  Facebook = PHP, MySQL, Linux.

  MySpace was well-known for being the biggest ColdFusion site in the
world, running on Windows, IIS, and MS-SQL.  I dunno if they've
changed things.

  I conclude there's more to a web site than the technology it runs on.

-- Ben