This isn’t part of the series on Stack Overflow’s architecture, but is a topic that has bitten us many times. Hopefully, some of this information helps you sort out issues you hit. You’re probably here because of an error like this: Could not load file or assembly ‘System.<…>, Version=4.x.x.x, Cultu...

This is #5 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Previous post (#4): Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition So…caching. What is it? It’s a way to get a quick payoff by not re-calculating or fetching things over and over, resulting in performance and cost wins....

This is #4 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Previous post (#3): Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment - 2016 Edition What is monitoring? As far as I can tell, it means different things to different people. But we more or less agree on the concept. I think. Maybe. Let’s...

Today, we deployed HTTPS by default on Stack Overflow. All traffic is now redirected to https:// and Google links will change over the next few weeks. The activation of this is quite literally flipping a switch (feature flag), but getting to that point has taken years of work. As of now, HTTPS is th...

This is #3 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Previous post (#2): Stack Overflow: The Hardware - 2016 Edition We’ve talked about Stack Overflow’s architecture and the hardware behind it. The next most requested topic was Deployment. How do we get code a developer (or so...

This is #2 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Previous post (#1): Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition Next post (#3): Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment - 2016 Edition Who loves hardware? Well, I do and this is my blog so I win. If you don’t love hardware ...

This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome. Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical Deconstruction Next post (#2): Stack Overflow: The Hardware - 2016 Edition To get an idea of what all of this stuff “does,” let me start off with an update on the aver...

As new posts in the series appear, I’ll add them here to serve as a master list: #1: Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition #2: Stack Overflow: The Hardware - 2016 Edition #3: Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment - 2016 Edition #4: Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition #5: Sta...

Update (August 11th): A patch for this bug has been released by Microsoft. Here’s their update to the advisory: We released an updated version of RyuJIT today, which resolves this advisory. The update was released as Microsoft Security Bulletin MS15-092 and is available on Windows Update or via dire...

My Developers Are Smarter Than Your DBAs by @Nick_Craver What would you say...you do here? Last month at Stack Overflow: 1,468,389,303 Page Views 5,183,954,727 HTTP Hits 71,562,833,811,315 Bytes Sent 3,202,505,376 CDN Hits 54,400,000,000,000 CDN Bytes 19,532,899,854 SQL Queries 81,505,688,410 Redis ...