The Tag Engine is entirely self-contained, which means not having to depend on an external service for very, very core functionality. It's a huge in-memory struct array structure that is optimized for SO use cases and precomputed results for heavily hit combinations. It's a simple windows service running on a few boxes working in a redundant team. CPU is about 2-5% almost always. Three boxes are not needed for load, just redundancy. If all those do fail at once, the local web servers will load the tag engine in memory and keep on going.
The Tag Engine is entirely self-contained, which means not having to depend on an external service for very, very core functionality. It's a huge in-memory struct array structure that is optimized for SO use cases and precomputed results for heavily hit combinations. It's a simple windows service running on a few boxes working in a redundant team. CPU is about 2-5% almost always. Three boxes are not needed for load, just redundancy. If all those do fail at once, the local web servers will load the tag engine in memory and keep on going.