I'd love to know what kind of server hardware/software is behind LQ and what it takes to power a crazy awesome and very busy site such as this.

You might want to use the "Report" button at the bottom of your post to ask a Mod to move your post to the LQ Suggestions and Feedback forum, where it is more likely to be noticed by someone who can help you.

Good tips. I have done that now.

I've covered this in-depth in the past. A quick search should turn it up.

--jeremy

(evil grin) It didn't, but maybe my search was too quick.

Perhaps that information might be fodder for a technical "About" page. Just a few basics, like how many gazillion petabytes is the database and how many aspirin it takes to keep the site responsive and stuff like that there. Just a thought.

I'll guess Jeremy is NOT running LQ off of a Raspberry Pi like I do to post my homemade beer pics.

mmmmmm beer!!!

I'm always constantly amazed at how people think a large forum site can be run off of something like a $10/month shared hosting account.

To answer the OP's question.... Sufficient plus at least 50%

What I'm really curious about is whether or not it's a single bare metal unit, or if it's on some kind of cloud system. Seems like most people these days opt for cloud based hosting, but for some reason I just don't like it.

As the current infrastructure is fairly old, it is mostly bare metal based (there is some cloud for testing, Q/A, etc). We're due for a technology refresh and will likely go with a more hybrid approach moving forward.

--jeremy

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So would you say LQ is reaching the limits of bare metal?

Most certainly not.

--jeremy

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Sorry if I'm annoying you, but this feels like quite the opportunity to talk to someone who has a lot of information I want access to lol.

So why move to the cloud then? Isn't it a serious hassle with lots of unpredictability in it? Isn't it also a security issue as your container will be in a variety of locations?

I've not made any final decisions yet, but as an example the main database server will definitely be staying on bare metal. The highly variable nature of the web cluster means that a hybrid approach for that portion likely makes sense.

--jeremy

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Good to know.

Alas, I'm having troubles searching for the thread where the details of what software/hardware power LQ. Could you give me some search terms I could use to look this up? Or perhaps a time reference when you last commented on this? Then I suppose I could just search through your posts.

It actually doesn't look like I posted after the most recent refresh (which was not all that recent to be fair). If there's interest I can post about the new infrastructure once that's up. The current infrastructure is realistically old enough that it's probably not of interest (additionally, it's fairly standard stuff. We use Percona/MySQL on bare metal in a replicated setup, nginx load balancer/proxy, etc). We had been using OCFS2 heavily in the past but moved to Gluster more recently due to a continual issue on the SAN where the OCFS2 partition was stored.

--jeremy

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