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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#101

Post by pbreit »

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.

Usually the opposite: business thinks it's going to get lots of users, engineers code for such, business way undershoots estimates, stuck with over-engineered app.

I've never heard of a PM saying such a thing.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#102

Post by pbreit »

cyberferret wrote: post #55
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.

> but even crappy options like RDS Curious as to why you see RDS as a 'crappy' option?? Given the choice of building and maintaining a MySQL box in the corner of your bedroom and hosting it on RDS - I know which way I would go (and I have done both over the years). If you are talking 'scaling' in terms of the OP's article, then RDS is almost a no brainer, and you can scale your instances (and add replicated instances…

No one hosts MySQL out of their bedroom. C'mon. The alternative is hosting the DB yourself at a hosting provider which is what most do and it works fine.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#103

Post by pbreit »

cyberferret wrote: post #64
qaq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest IOPS you can get on RDS is about a single consumer grade SSD.

Fair enough. But if the alternative is setting up a consumer grade PC on a consumer grade internet connection in a (non environmentally or power controlled) corner of a room at home, then surely we are looking at a similar situation? Given that spooling up a RDS instance is quicker and cheaper than buying all the hardware and spending time installing and configuring an SQL server, then if time to market is a critical…

Have you heard of hosting? No one is running servers in their house. Nobody.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#104

Post by frik »

cyberferret wrote: post #52
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. I would say this is because of the simple fact of visibility and adoption. You've probably never heard of these services probably because they ground to a halt with a mere 1000 users, so they never got mainstream enough to be recognised as a viable service. It is a bit like how no one remembers the dozens of people who failed to achieve sustain…

Friendster and MySpace failed because of scaling issues - but it was not scaling per se but bad execution: They choose the wrong technology, brought in the wrong CTOs who bought very expensive hardware (wrong, few expensive high end servers with expensive storage, instead several more low cost normal servers) and software with very high license costs (wrong, ColdFusion on dotNet (experimental) on Windows (high lic costs)). That's why both lost the race, they stalled development because of rewrites for a year (too long).

Edit: you can read about both project histories, and learn about them. Of course on gets down-voted for mentioning it.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#105

Post by pbreit »

tyingq wrote: post #3

He makes the valid point that performance for each individual user, like page load time, does matter. Just that building for an audience size you don't yet have is mostly wasted time. Seems reasonable. I wonder, though, if PHP feels like an anchor to the average Facebook developer. I realize they architected around it, but it must have some effect on recruiting, retention, etc. I use PHP myself, and don't hate it, bu…

Facebook doesn't want those developers anyway.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#106

Post by pacaro »

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…

One approach that I like is to think about scaling in terms of epochs. Each epoch of your system should handle maybe 3 orders of magnitude (let's say users, epoch 1 is 1k - 100k, epoch 2 is 100k - 10m, etc — epoch 0 was your MVP/PoC)

When you implement each epoch, do a paper design for the next epoch, this helps you think about how you will get there, and can prevent you from writing yourself into a corner, without over indexing on scaling issues that you don't have yet

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#107

Post by pbreit »

milesrout wrote: post #21
qaq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unre…

When you have that sort of attitude about 2 of the most widely used languages/platforms in existence, I think it's more a reflection on you.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#108

Post by pbreit »

cyberferret wrote: post #83
pbreit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're refusing to learn from someone who lived it. I also know of zero services which failed because they couldn't scale their technology. But I know of 100s that failed because they couldn't get enough users or usage. Your example about the DB tables is exactly the trap to avoid while you are iterating rapidly to try and find product/market fit.

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: *…

None of those problems sound like scaling issues.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#109

Post by bedros »

cyberferret wrote: post #52
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. I would say this is because of the simple fact of visibility and adoption. You've probably never heard of these services probably because they ground to a halt with a mere 1000 users, so they never got mainstream enough to be recognised as a viable service. It is a bit like how no one remembers the dozens of people who failed to achieve sustain…

myspace.com failed because it could not scale

I personally switched to facebook for two reasons:

got sick of repeated errors every time I browse myspace

facebook has better album permissions, (myspace has none)

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#110

Post by [deleted] »

gpm wrote: post #65
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. First focus on building what people love. If people love your product, they will put up with the growing pains (e.g. Twitter used to be down a lot!). They haven't failed (yet), but I think gitlab.com would be a lot bigger if they scaled faster. Lots of people have been rejected using it because it was too slow.

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