December 7, 2007

PayPal use Linux

PayPal have built up a network of servers to house its electronic payment processing system, its small than that used by the larger financial organisations but it is responsible for processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second, which cover seventeen different currencies and totals around $50 billion per year.

The company use Red Hat Linux and after stripping out all of the features those they no longer need; they add what they need to optimise it for security.

The whole point of this is have the operation on the 4000 or so servers, this is instead of running the operation on a mainframe or two, using a mainframe would be more practical, cheaper and better the climate as 4000 servers must use more power and may even be slower at times.

Source [Information Week]