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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#91

Post by cyberferret »

timewarrior wrote: post #85
cyberferret wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that I haven't "lived it". Over the past 2 or 3 years, I have built around 8 web apps. Some which got virtually no traction at all, and some which have reached a happy medium of users and income. None which have reached mega scale or millions of users (yet). Some of the (real world) feedback I got from the web apps that failed to get off the ground were due mainly to our customers complaining that: *…

It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate. Most people see much less success. The original suggestion is geared towards first few tries that people make. Once they have made a few attempts, they learn from it and naturally build more scalable products without spending extra effort. You have already read my story about my first try which had a very poor start.…

Thanks, and also thank you for not reading my posts the wrong way. I am in no way having a go at you or refuting what you say. You've built something and got it to a level that many of us can only dream of, and for that you have my admiration and respect.

Like you, each subsequent app that I built contained the lessons learned from the previous efforts - better front end frameworks, better data table normalising, better hosting infrastructure etc.

Part of me always thinks back to the ones that didn't work, and I always ask myself - would they have worked if they had faster page refreshes, or more flexible data entry? Perhaps if I had spent more time in the planning and design before I launched them, they may not have sunk as quickly? Those 1000 users that time who came from my HN post and saw an 'Error 500' page - could a fraction of them been the ones who would have signed up and made us profitable if they didn't see the error page as their first introduction to my app??

For that reason alone, I am always skeptical of any post that promotes 'iterate often and fast' or 'fail quickly' rather than 'spend time on design and a unique experience'...

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#92

Post by godzillabrennus »

apersona wrote: post #86
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…

> I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Bullshit. What about the site (voat something?) that tried to be an alternative to reddit when there was some scandal there but couldn't keep users because they kept crashing?

It's still going and they post about the scaling issues being due to lack of funding available that would allow them to continue their business model.

http://voat.co

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#93

Post by hliyan »

the_arun wrote: post #71
hliyan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably because implicitly made available decisions from the get go. For example, if you had chosen MongoDB instead of MySQL, the story would be different. Ditto if say, Meteor instead of Java.

Isn't Meteor a framework? I'm assuming you meant Javascript instead of Meteor

Yes, I should have said JavaEE vs JavaScript

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#94

Post by camel_Snake »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #44
soneca wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So use a separate sentence or formulate your ideas more clearly? I see this so often when developers write. From tutorials to official documentation etc. Extra words where a simpler sentence would have sufficed, poor structuring of ideas, not splitting text into appropriate paragraphs and sentences. I always feel dumb until I figure out what was trying to be said and then you realise just how poor the writing is.

You should write a post on the parallels between legible code/english.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#95

Post by henriquemaia »

apersona wrote: post #86
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…

> I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Bullshit. What about the site (voat something?) that tried to be an alternative to reddit when there was some scandal there but couldn't keep users because they kept crashing?

I don't think that's a fair analysis of what happened. Though it seems obvious that they have lost some potencial users by being down so many times, ultimately what has obstructed Voat’s success is its core community: the fringe of the fringe of reddit.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#97

Post by pbreit »

beefsack wrote: post #43

Taking a completely blasé approach to efficiency is potentially as dangerous as becoming hyper-focused on it. Not all businesses become roaring successes, and those who achieve moderate success often don't get the resources to fix deep-seated performance or architectural issues (either via engineering and/or throwing hardware at it.) Eventually these technical woes can completely halt momentum and I've seen it even d…

No. The most sensible approach is optimizing for developer efficiency while you figure out how to get users and usage. If you are lucky enough to get product/market fit, scaling is easy.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#98

Post by pbreit »

beefsack wrote: post #53
timewarrior wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that completely blasé is pretty bad. However in this case being blasé would mean, not working hard to scale when you users are getting a bad experience. A basic stack these days node.js+mongo, go+*sql can easily handle more than 100k users even with one of the worst implementations. Most products don't reach that point!

> A basic stack these days node.js+mongo, go+*sql can easily handle more than 100k users... That is making some very large assumptions about application workload. For an application which is purely a CRUD interface to a database, yes.

Most apps are mainly CRUD.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#99

Post by iamd3vil »

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…

Since I am an Indian I know of a service which is hated by most people - IRCTC because of it's scaling issues. It's a lot better now but I remember those horrible days you have to do a tatkal ticket.

I also know of some government services (my state has paperless administration so everything is digital) which are used in day to day basis (but only hundreds of users) by government employees goes down for almost 2 hours per day everyday which stops work for everyone (both the employees and the people came for that service). These services are developed by companies like TCS and Infosys. Only if they thought of scaling before.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#100

Post by timewarrior »

cyberferret wrote: post #91
timewarrior wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate. Most people see much less success. The original suggestion is geared towards first few tries that people make. Once they have made a few attempts, they learn from it and naturally build more scalable products without spending extra effort. You have already read my story about my first try which had a very poor start.…

Thanks, and also thank you for not reading my posts the wrong way. I am in no way having a go at you or refuting what you say. You've built something and got it to a level that many of us can only dream of, and for that you have my admiration and respect. Like you, each subsequent app that I built contained the lessons learned from the previous efforts - better front end frameworks, better data table normalising, bet…

It's all in good spirit of sharing and learning.

When you are thinking back, also consider the alternative where could you have missed opportunities and product launches because of extra effort spent on scaling upfront.

It's all good learning in the end. It's great to be in your situation. Keep at it and you will see great success in future!

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