Let me preface by saying I am not knocking .Net (it helps me earn my living)…
I recently heard of a site were the developer/owner bragged that he had minimal hardware to support his site (plentyoffish.com). This site is listed as being in the top 50 in terms of traffic on Alexa. I am struggling to wrap my head around how something like that can be acomplished by doing what the developer/owner claims, a single developer writing a site (it took him 2 weeks to get the intial site up) using minimal hardware that gets 2 million hits per hour (peak). Larger companies have huge web farms to handle traffic like that…
How do you write code so efficient, with limited hardware resources (he claims he uses only three DB servers)? Has anyone worked on or developed a site that efficient?
The Microsoft stack is remarkably fast if you avoid all the drag/drop garbage that gives ASP.NET a bad name.
That’s the whole stack. It’s all good. You can say what you like about Microsoft, its business practices and its consumer products, but their development tools and servers are top notch.
My personal experience with their web stack includes a site that sees ~500 pageviews/second and seldom spikes the server above 15%. That’s fast enough for most operations.