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Microsoft Migrates Internal Servers to 64-bit
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Apr 29, 2005 07:02 AM
from the movin-on-up dept.
from the movin-on-up dept.
daria42 writes "Microsoft says servers running the company's website and MSN Search and Messenger applications have been migrated to the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. 'Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,' a spokesperson said. In addition, 'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.' According to the company, the Messenger servers handle about 70 million users."
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It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers down? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't imagine that Microsoft.com could get slashdotted, so maybe they're having some severe teething issues.
This doesn't bode well for the future of 64bit Windows computing
Re:It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers do (Score:3, Informative)
Works for me, and i'm in the uk also.
Re:It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers do (Score:3, Interesting)
Tracing route to www.microsoft.com
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms neon.winchester.local [192.168.0.19]
(blah)
7 259 ms 264 ms 251 ms ten7-2.paix-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.37.26]
8 484 ms 263 ms 371 ms ten8-3.bay-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.63.74]
9 259 ms 267 ms 256 ms po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138]
10 po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138] reports: Destination
Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
i now know ur IP adress, prepair 2 b h4x0red! [slashdot.org]
i will pwn ur hard drv!
Parent
Re:Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers do (Score:3, Funny)
It's good PR (Score:3, Interesting)
It does seem to me that the performance (or lack thereof) of MSN Messenger and related properties points to teething pains in the upgrade process. It happens quite often that you cannot sign in to Messenger or hotmail for brief periods and on some occasions you get punted. From what I have seen the problem is quite intermittent--can't sign in? Wait 15 minutes. It doesn't seem to be re
AMD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or Intel (Score:3, Informative)
Thank Microsoft for that, actually (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:AMD? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
AMD or INTEL? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:AMD or INTEL? (Score:5, Informative)
They had a big press release about it not too long ago.
Parent
Re:AMD or INTEL? (Score:3, Funny)
About time (Score:2, Interesting)
As usual Microsoft is ten years behind times.
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
Windows was already 64 bit when the DEC Alpha came out. Which was somewhere between 1992-95 IIRC.
The only news is is that windows now actually runs on a popular 64 bit processor. It already ran on Itanium for some time too.
Well, not exactly... (Score:3, Informative)
Except that the DEC Alpha port of Windows NT was 32-bit only [windowsitpro.com]. IIRC, Microsoft never officially released a 64-bit version of Windows that ran on Alpha, and it was DEC/Compaq who did most of the development on it before it was cancelled.
Akamai (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't they using Akamai's help in that?
Re:Akamai (Score:3, Informative)
A couple thousand servers... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A couple thousand servers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Stress-test your own systems with randomized queries Google (or MSN or Yahoo!) gets and see how well it stacks up against Google's (or MSN's or Yahoo!'s) hardware, rated with GMarks (or YMarks! or....you get the idea).
Parent
Re:A couple thousand servers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much of an apples/oranges problem there, though. Yes, a search is a search is a search... but there are very different things going on relative to MSN membership, Google AdSense ads, and so on. Very different back-end processes and business issues would completely eclipse, I suspect, discussions about the individual web servers' OS. IIS on Win2003 may not be every slashdotter's cup of tea, but it's not orders of magnitude different from other servers in its ability to serve up a page. It's all that other behind-the-scenes tomfoolerly that both sites are doing that are what really weigh them down and burn up the CPU cycles. It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
Parent
Re:A couple thousand servers... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
There's an interesting video on Channel9 [msdn.com] interviewing Omar Shahine [shahine.com] that describes Hotmail internal architecture. Yup, Channel9 is a Microsoft sponsored site, and Omar is a lead program manager on a Hotmail team. He has a great blog that shows a love for devices; you'll find him talking about the iPod, Treo, PSP, etc. Channel9 also has a ton of videos on everything ranging from C#
And, with that... (Score:4, Insightful)
from 250 to 25 servers (Score:5, Interesting)
What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?
Re:from 250 to 25 servers (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:from 250 to 25 servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:from 250 to 25 servers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1M+ (Score:3, Informative)
You can use the driver verifier's (verifier.exe) pool tracking function to see how much memory tcpip.sys is taking up.
The nonpaged pool limit in the 64 bit versions is 128GB.
64bit is all you need (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of some other famous quotes:
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995) (http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html [cantrip.org])
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that" Source: Speech at Computer History Museum (http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/01/HNgate
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
64-bit hardware? (Score:5, Funny)
MS: "Yes, our brand new car has a beautiful high-tech hydrogen fuel cell in it!"
Driver: "But it's a diesel car..."
MS: "Well... yes.... it's actually just sitting in the back seat for now."
MadCow.
Re:64-bit hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:64-bit hardware? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Altavista used 64 bit servers at launch years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
They also had much better capability and accuracy, allowing you to search for exactly what you wanted, not just what was most popular, allowing things like the near keyword, partial word wildcarding, and many more.
Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts. The market has stagnated under Google who can't figure out how to offer even as good a search as their competitors offered at the time they launched.
Tell me something useful.
Re:Altavista used 64 bit servers at launch years a (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, altavista.com, the one that worked for a few months and then got spammed into oblivion and has been fairly unusable ever since which is why everyone now uses Google?
I would never have described it as 'accurate'. The only reason it could possibly be seen to be accurate was because at one stage, there were no porn sites to spam the index with, so it *had* to return decent page by default - because that's all that was there.
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft has always gone "dog food" (Score:5, Informative)
hotmail (Score:4, Informative)
Stock prices-AMD? (Score:4, Interesting)
If its good enough for Microsoft, its good enough for us, right boss?
Never been much into stocks, but right about now something tells me to buy.
Re:Paying with fire (Score:5, Insightful)
uhh... which is EXACTLY why they're making this announcement.. so that there is "somebody" out there for it works. they're trying to boost it's acceptance you know.
Parent
Re:Paying with fire (Score:5, Insightful)
Untill you've had enough time to see how it performs for others you keep a system you know works.
You're saying that Microsoft, with all of its expertise at hand, is going to wait for a few other companies to roll out their OS before they do, so they can see how it goes? Give me a break. And more to the point, why would anyone else use it if even Microsoft won't. Dumb, just dumb.
Parent
Re:Paying with fire (Score:4, Informative)
They've got to do it. If they don't make the switch, how can they expect customers to?!
If you read the original article [zdnet.com.au], the server is apparently quite stable (makes sense: servers run just a few processes intensively but repetitively, and cracks would show quickly), it's the client that is more questionable:
Parent
Re:Paying with fire (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who is willing to switch there entire network over to something only out of beta for a few days is an idiot. It's that simple.
In fact they've running it for months, even before the RTM date. Do you have a better way to debug the OS than putting it in servers which receive 30 millions of visits each day? (They have a farm of those to serve those 30 millions, so if one of them crashes and you lose one connection is not a big deal)
BTW, OSDL did the same by putting linux 2.5 development versions in all their servers (getting uptimes of 200+ days in some cases BTW)
Parent
Re:Paying with fire (Score:3, Funny)
It's not well known, but the shine of the BSODs from this cluster is the real source of the Norther Lights! ;)
You haven't used Windows recently, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, let's face it, it's a server. It doesn't really need the latest ATI gaming drivers, nor a 9800 XT running at 80 Celsius just from showing the desktop, nor some experimental NForce 4 software-RAID drivers, nor a fancy sound card, etc.
More importantly, it doesn't get all the crap
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you do realize, though, that it doesn't hurt either.
1. Any library which isn't actually used, isn't even loaded. Most of Windows is just
2. Any memory page which isn't actually used, can be swapped to disc and _stays_ swapped. I.e., if after painting the desktop you don't actually run a GUI program on it, all that code to paint combos and whatnot will not even be in RAM.
So not installing a GUI would help with... what? With the few K of RAM needed to paint the clock in the tray? (Or not even that if the taskbar is set to auto-hide.)
And as opposed to... what? A typical Sun Solaris (UNIX) server also has all the GUI libraries, just in case you need to run some X stuff on it over the network. We have admins doing that every day. And that too means that they're loaded in memory when you do run graphics stuff, they're unloaded when you don't. Just like on Windows, eh?
Basically what I'm saying is: before deciding that including something is dumb, please actually do an analysis, rather than just letting your ideals of perfection do the talking. You'd be surprised how much stuff may not be, technically speaking, optimal, but nevertheless is not a liability either. A lot of flame-wars could be avoided if people asked themselves "well, exactly how much does it hurt?" instead of "is it 100% perfect and 100% optimal?"
Parent
Actually, no, Apple isn't it (Score:3, Informative)
By comparison, 64 bit Windows _is_ almost entirely 64 bit code. If you want to run 32 bit code on it, it runs in a "WOW" (Windows On Windows) virtual machine. Well, not virtual in the same way as say, Java, but in the same way as, say, Wine.
Re:Itanium! (Score:4, Funny)
No, actually. It is a 64bit extention to a 32bit extention to a 16bit extention to a 8bit extention to a 4 bit architecture. The Intel 4004 [intel4004.com] was actually the first one of this family. I guess you are too young to know.
Parent
Re:Itanium! (Score:3, Interesting)
Opteron actually IS a 64-bit extension to the x86 hell. Same instruction set - they just extended it to 64 bit, they didn't changed anything. The success of the x86-64 architecture is being just a "extension", making very easy for compilers, software developers etc. to switch to the "new" architecture. They only added 8 registers more to the typical 8 - PPC and almost every 64-bit cp
Re:Running out of ideas (Score:3, Funny)
Disable Clippy.