Have you ever wondered what software powers sites like YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace? Wonder no more because Pingdom has the scoop! The results are located in the table above, and as you can see Linux, Apache, and MySQL are among the most popular tools. In the end this is how the stats play out:
OS: Linux 7 – Windows 2
Web server: Apache 7 – IIS 2 – Lighttpd 2
Scripting: PHP 4 – Perl 4 – ASP.NET 2 – Python 1 – Java 1
Database: MySQL 7 – SQL Server 1
The stats were compiled from a site called High Scalability who has assembled several posts relating to the architecture of large sites. Wikimedia (the platform Wikipedia runs on) is among the most impressive profiles that they’ve done in my opinion. It said that they receive 30,000 HTTP requests per second, and have upwards of 350 servers being managed by just 6 people. I knew Wikipedia was big, but that’s pretty darn insane!
PlentyofFish was another interesting profile that they did. It receives 30+ million hits everyday, and it only needs 2 web servers and 3 database servers to run smoothly. What’s even more impressive is that everything they serve up is dynamic…yep, none of it is static. Who would have thought?
I was wondering about Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Amazon and huge companies like that.
I agree, however, I believe Microsoft uses their products and code either .net or .asp.
It is not really amazing to see Linux, Apache, PHP and mySQL win out as they are all free and just work reliably and for a long time.
Well as far as I know Amazon and eBay run off Java/JSP. I know this because one of my professor at school is a huge Java programmer and he was telling us which web sites use Java/JSP (Nintendo and C|Net are the other big Java/JSP users). As far as Yahoo! and Google…I would guess in the line of Python or Perl…mind you that is just a guess and it seems like Google has their own in house web servers called GWS and I am more than sure the Yahoo! is the same way with in house web servers. Microsoft, hands down ASP.NET and IIS.
Open source software in there. the results were obvious.
I’m sure the really big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! all use different languages depending on the task at hand. there’s no sense in using languages that would make doing something more difficult, so they probably hire on programmers for all different languages.