Google Servers - Do you ever wonder about what kind of servers google uses and why they

Do you ever wonder about what kind of servers google uses? Or why even though with all those searches per second (over 1000 times every second) they dont lagg? I was thinking about it and Google must have some monster servers like astahost does. After some research i found this: Google's server infrastructure is divided in several types, each for a different purpose. Google DNS Servers answer the DNS requests and serve as intelligent, worldwide load-balancers. They guess the data center nearest to the user to speed up all HTTP requests. Google Web Servers coordinate the execution of queries sent by users, then format the result into an HTML page. The execution consists of sending queries to index servers, merging the results, computing their rank, retrieving a summary for each hit (using the document server), asking for suggestions from the spelling servers, and finally getting a list of advertisements from the ad server. Data-gathering servers are permanently dedicated to spidering the Web. They update the index and document databases and apply Google's algorithms to assign ranks to pages.
Index servers each contain a set of index shards. They return a list of document IDs ("docid"), such that documents corresponding to a certain docid contain the query word. These servers need less disk space, but suffer the greatest CPU workload. Document servers store documents. Each document is stored on dozens of document servers. When performing a search, a document server returns a summary for the document based on query words. They can also fetch the complete document when asked. These servers need more disk space. Ad servers manage advertisements offered by services like AdWords and AdSense. And finally spelling servers make suggestions about the spelling of queries. The servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. They run there own server software called Google Web Server. The goal in this is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per unit of power instead of absolute performance because the power use for over 450,000 servers is over 20 megawatts which can cost over $2 million US per month in electricity to run. Now thats a huge electricity bill. My parrents would kill me for that. I also found some of the specs of the servers which actually surprise me. As of 2005 info the most commonly used servers are only 533 MHz Intel Celeron to a dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III. Since then they most likely have been upgraded. Also 2003/2004 info says that they have one or more 80GB hard disks per server and 2–4 GB of RAM for each server. The location of where Google keeps these servers is not known currently. There is apparently though a project being worked on in the town of The Dalles, Oregon, on the Columbia River. The project code name is "Project 02" and is to build a supercomputer that will be expected to add to their current global network capable of processing billions of search queries per day and a growing repertoire of other services. The data centres new complex is said to be about the size of two football fields with four stories high cooling towers. Hope this helped all those of you wondering about google servers and you can msg me if you have more questions.

 

 

 

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By the way, this seems terrific. However, the biggest machine in the world today (single machine I am speaking) is the 64-cpu AIX system, it rates three millions transactions par seconds. This is really huge.
Of course, google probably does not rely on a single system, it's safer to spread amongst a log of separate machines, but this also makes the administration rather complicated.

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Thats a yes and no because google has it set up so they are all synced and depend on each other if that makes any sence. The systems are made so if error does occur you just have to turn them off and back on. They made it that easy with there own software. But you are right there has to be alot of administration for that. Its still amazing though at how with those servers it doesnt lagg. I expected google to have like quad or 8core servers or something but they dont.

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