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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#121

Post by stingraycharles »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #73
gpm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

gitlab.com is not their core business. It's mostly a demo.

That's not how people perceive it, though.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#122

Post by hopfog »

I'm in the unfortunate position where this question actually matters from day 1. I learnt the hard way a few days ago when I hit the bottleneck (about 50-100 concurrent users) and I'm not sure how to proceed.

It's a multiplayer drawing site built with Node.js/socket.io. I'm already on the biggest Heroku dyno my budget can allow and it's too big of a task to rewrite the back end to support load balancing (and I wouldn't know where to start). Bear in mind that this is a side-project I'm not making any money of.

I had a lot of new features planned but now I've put development on hold. It's not fun to work on something you can't allow to get popular since it would kill it.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#123

Post by timewarrior »

jssmith wrote: post #114
carbocation wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a delightful retelling; thanks for sharing. > I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale. Genuine question: what about Friendster?

Friendster definitely failed because they couldn't pull off scale. I was CTO of the Tagged social network at the time and the issue loomed large during our 2005 fundraising. Investors had seen $50m go down the drain when Friendster got slow. Despite network effects, users moved over to products that were up and running (mostly MySpace but also hi5, etc.). I seem to recall that the Friendster team had more than one ab…

Thanks for sharing your experience.

There is always scope for a botched execution or just pure bad luck. I wish someone shared more candid details of what happened at Friendster.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#124

Post by shoefly »

Evolution is a beautiful thing.

I once worked for a monolith who decided to invent a new way of programming. They built something massive and ready to scale even larger. And then they discovered no one wanted the product.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#125

Post by Dylan16807 »

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: *…

If it was slow for a small number of users, that is a fundamental design or operations flaw, not a scaling problem.

Nobody is saying that performance doesn't matter. But if it performs well with 100 users, you can worry about the performance with 10k users later. And if it doesn't perform well with 100 users, it doesn't matter if the scaling is O(logn) even O(1).

Performance under a sudden flood of users matters, but a lot less than day-to-day performance. And most of the criticism I see for sites dying is when they're serving static content with ideal O(1) scaling, but in a very unoptimized way.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#126

Post by Everhusk »

hopfog wrote: post #122

I'm in the unfortunate position where this question actually matters from day 1. I learnt the hard way a few days ago when I hit the bottleneck (about 50-100 concurrent users) and I'm not sure how to proceed. It's a multiplayer drawing site built with Node.js/socket.io. I'm already on the biggest Heroku dyno my budget can allow and it's too big of a task to rewrite the back end to support load balancing (and I wouldn…

Hey, you might want to check out https://realm.io/ , the demo is exactly what you said. Good luck!

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#127

Post by Dylan16807 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #92
apersona wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

But is that a true scaling problem like "2x servers can't handle 2x users" or is it a business model problem like "every user means losing money and we can't afford more even if the cost was O(n^0.9)"?

I can't find the posts you're talking about.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#128

Post by Jach »

No one else bothered by "End-to-end tracking of customers" as the primary concern? Ok then.

On the subject of scaling, I think it's good to have an idea in your head about a path to scalability. One server, using PHP and MySQL? Ok. Just be aware you might have to load balance either or both the server and DB in the future, and that's assuming you've gotten the low hanging fruit of making them faster on their own. But as this thread's top comment illustrates, learning that stuff on the fly isn't too hard. So maybe it's better to make sure you're going with technology you sort of know has had big successes elsewhere (like Java, PHP, or MySQL) and even if you're not quite sure how you might scale it beyond the defaults you know others have solved that problem and you can learn later if/when needed.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#129

Post by yxhuvud »

hopfog wrote: post #122

I'm in the unfortunate position where this question actually matters from day 1. I learnt the hard way a few days ago when I hit the bottleneck (about 50-100 concurrent users) and I'm not sure how to proceed. It's a multiplayer drawing site built with Node.js/socket.io. I'm already on the biggest Heroku dyno my budget can allow and it's too big of a task to rewrite the back end to support load balancing (and I wouldn…

What is it your processor spends its time on? Perhaps those parts could be rethought and redesigned? Perhaps heroku is the wrong solution for those tasks even if it is good for the rest of the app. Would it be possible to find something cheaper for just those parts?

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#130

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

Does Access actually work well for 20 users?
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