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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#21

Post by milesrout »

qaq wrote: post #13
milesrout wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even ignoring the innumerable flaws PHP (yes including 7) has as a language, its standard library is among the worst standard libraries of any language.

Everything has flaws but PHP is a reasonable choice for many problems. Python pip is crap compared to composer for example. While my favorite language is Elixir I mostly do Node and Python at work can't say experience is significantly better with either of them compared to PHP 7.

>Everything has flaws

False equivalence. PHP has many, many more flaws to a much deeper and more serious level than any other mainstream programming language. It's insecure, buggy, full of broken behaviour for legacy systems, slow and easy to misuse. Its standard library is inconsistent, hard to learn, easy to misuse, full of legacy behaviour and slow.

>but PHP is a reasonable choice for many problems.

PHP is an unreasonable choice for every problem unless you have already solved your problem with PHP. I'm not saying that Facebook should rewrite in something else, obviously, but nobody should be starting new work in PHP. Nobody.

>Python pip is crap compared to composer for example.

There's nothing at all wrong with it.

>While my favorite language is Elixir I mostly do Node and Python at work can't say experience is significantly better with either of them compared to PHP 7.

Well you're quite objectively wrong. Yes Node.js is a pile of shit comparable to PHP, but it's Javascript, what do you expect? Javascript is basically the second worst mainstream programming language right behind PHP. Yes they've both had superficial changes that make them more enjoyable to write recently, but none of those changes fix the underlying inherent problems with those languages.

Python, on the other hand, is a well-built, well-designed, much more sane language.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#22

Post by doctorcroc »

technosamay20 wrote: post #15

Couldn't agree with this article more. I built the biggest social network to come out of India from 2006-2009. It was like Twitter but over text messaging. At it's peak it had 50M+ users and sent 1B+ text messages in a day. When I started, the app was on a single machine. I didn't know a lot about databases and scaling. Didn't even know what database indexes are and what are their benefits. Just built the basic produ…

Awesome story and takeaways. What happened to your product and what did you learn you could not keep up with or grow into?

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#23

Post by virmundi »

qaq wrote: post #17
virmundi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've literally been waffling back and forth between UUID and BigInt for the last week. The reason for this is I need to handle eventually distributed systems. Do I need UUIDs? Maybe not, but after much debt, I've decided that the storage requirements of such an index in memory is worth the ability to move from Postgres to Postgresql-xl.

The problem is not with memory problem is that after checkpoint postgres will do full page writes for serial you will be touching way fewer pages compared to UUID so write amplification for UUID vs bigint can be 60X+

Can you go into a bit more detail? I've seen amplification referenced before. My estimation is that the database will be pretty much read heavy. I will need to split a given database across multiple instances.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#24

Post by qaq »

tbrownaw wrote: post #18
qaq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok what can you write it in that you can't scale to 10K users by just adding web servers? The hard to scale part is storage layer but even crappy options like RDS will happily support 10K users.

Microsoft Access. Works fine for something one team uses, works... not fine for something the entire corporation uses.

Well there are tools to help easily migrate Access to SQL Server, but this is moving fairly far from the original premise of this topic.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#25

Post by drblast »

cabaalis wrote: post #8

I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions? Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)

Those are s-expressions. It's an in-joke among the Common Lisp crowd.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#26

Post by soneca »

cabaalis wrote: post #8

I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions? Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)

Nice writing :)

I would blame it as commenting habit. Need to explain everything twice. "What if the reader doesnt understand exactly what I mean?"

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#27

Post by scrollaway »

cabaalis wrote: post #8

I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions? Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)

It's a writing style, not specific to developers. I'm prone to it myself.

At least in my case, it means that I am writing my thoughts into the text box as a stream, and I forego editing the structure once it's written. It happens because I tend to get sidetracked or want to mention something in-passing without working it into the structure of the article/comment.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#28

Post by imh »

cabaalis wrote: post #8

I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions? Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)

I've noticed the same thing with scientists. To make an uneducated guess, many people with similar education or social status or whatever really need communication not just as a core skill, but as a primary thing they are responsible for producing. Their peers who produce other things like scientists and engineers don't so uniformly need to hone that skill. I had a zillion problem sets in undergrad, while my friends in the arts and humanities wrote a zillion essays. Likely because of that, I'm prone to writing winding sentences, where (for lack of a better structure) I will, without regard for tangents in the middle of a sentence to address some concern better treated separately, and in a way that will force you the reader to do lots of backtracking since that is relevant here (it's relevant here, so why not write it here?), just nest things wildly. I expect a humanities professor would have ripped that habit out of me.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#29

Post by wanderr »

milesrout wrote: post #7
qaq wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) FB uses a lot of languages other than Hack 2) Hack is fairly reasonable language even has pipe operator :) 3) While it is prevailing sentiment that PHP sux I think PHP 7 is fairly reasonable language

Even ignoring the innumerable flaws PHP (yes including 7) has as a language, its standard library is among the worst standard libraries of any language.

besides haystack, needle vs needle, haystack, what do you view as so bad about PHP's standard library? The main critique I've heard is that it's so big, but it's hard to see that as a downside unless you're a maintainer of the language itself. To me it's great to have all this stuff built in, you very rarely need to add in dependencies, and besides fewer dependencies being better in general, it also means you can get started faster, you don't have to spend so much time figuring out what's the popular library for solving x, and is it still maintained, and was it built with a bunch of other weird dependencies? You just search the docs, find what you need, make note of what you need, issues, examples, etc., and you're off to the races.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#30

Post by skinp »

devduderino wrote: post #11

I care because it usually goes like this: Product manager > "Niche sass app {x} will never need to support more than 10-20 users" Two weeks after launch > "We have 10k users and counting, why didn't you architect this for scale?" Always assume you underestimated the scope of the project.

Interesting. It might be a by-product of having worked in larger companies, but my experience has pretty much always been: Product manager > "We need this to work for 10k r/s at launch". Actual launch throughput (and all time peak): 100 r/s

Now I always mostly just assume (capacity asked / 10) is more than enough!

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