Well, if we look in the source code we see that almost the whole this page is generated using Javascript. Now, I am not a front end developer but I do know that Javascript is not easy on the processor and RAM (try opening this page for example What sta…

interesting article

My take is a bit different. I would say that Quora is, at this time, more of a technology company and less than a media one. Why? Because they have built among the first real time Q&A websites (as far as I know none of the rivals has something like thi…

The answer to this question is in this blog url: http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined...

I have been thinking about Quora recently and it’s current traction. I like Quora a lot and think that it’s one of the smartest companies out there but here’s the thing. What is happening with it’s traction? There is no doubt that it is cutting edg…

You could build a site like Quora (Questions & Answers) but not exactly like Quora. Quora uses some open source but also in-house developed technologies and you or who is developing your site using WordPress will need to replicate, not an easy task (es…

Good summary here by Phil Whelan: http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined...

Twitter: Main application is made on RoR. Using, Scala for insights and data mining at the back end. Facebook:is having a hard time because it was initially made on PHP. FB chat + All newer features post 2006 are based on frameworks in Erlang, Haskell,…

http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined
and
http://www.philwhln.com/summifys-technology-examined

They use Tornado, and a framework called LiveNode. http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined provides an excellent, recent summary gleaned from the founders’ answers on this site….

You can add Phil Whelan’s article on Quora’s architecture too: http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined...

Do you have a sense for how many man hours this would take to build?

It’s important to understand that the co-founders at Quora understand the technologies they are using very well. They planned for scaling and performance before they built their tools and architecture. They understand MySQL very well and how they can use it as the basis for a scalable data-store. They seem to also know when the limitations of this architecture will be reached and I have no doubts that they have plans in place for migrating the architecture, where necessary, to different technologies. That said, they will likely encounter some unique challenges in scaling that others have not encountered before. This is due to the unique way that they have created Quora. Friendfeed is the closest website structure I can think of off the top of my head, but I expect Quora to take the scaling to a whole new level. LiveNode and webnode2 show that they are not affraid of building their own solution where one does not exist. The question might not be WHEN to move to a NoSQL solution (if that is your question), but WHEN to build your own NoSQL solution that uniquely addresses your scaling challenges.

Quora uses persistent connections. A HTTP connection is established with the server when you start typing the search query. This connection is kept open and further requests are made on this same open connection. The connection will terminate (times-out) if not used for 60 seconds. If a connection times-out then a new connection is established when typing begins.

By “persistent connections”, do you mean HTTP keep-alive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepalive)?

Also, thank you for the further reading suggestions!

I believe we’re missing something crucial: stats. Scaling up is getting easier but setting up this kind of architecture requires a lot of learning and time. So the question for us, entrepreneurs, would be WHEN since you answered to the HOW.

At how many HTTP or SQL requests per day should we start caring about details. Except the fact that NoSQL does not appear necessary before 1M users, what other milestones should we watch out to know when IT’S TIME.

See U soon.

However, as a user, I’d noticed that Quora’s platform seemed to be able to withstand as much abuse as I could throw at it through my undisciplined work and browsing habits. High reliability, fast, not a Chrome browser resource hog, real-time updating of information without locking out users, yet no getting hung. I’ve never timed out on Quora, either.

Of course (unless one is Robert Scoble, snark snark), there aren’t many image files to contend with, nor multi-media, which are resource hogs.

Thank you so much for this post, and for satisfying some of my curiosity. (I need to go back and re-read it carefully, there’s a lot of content here).

I look forward to more!