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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#141

Post by Trundle »

shadowmint wrote: post #138

I care. It's easy to brush off scaling concerns as not important, but I've had personal experience where it's mattered, and if you want a high profile example, look at twitter. Yes, premature optimization is a bad thing, and so is over engineering; but that's easy to say if you have the experience to make the right initial choices that mean you have a meaningful path forward to scale when you do need it. For example,…

The article is about choosing a business idea where technical scale isn't important. Twitter would fall under a "media play" which is what the author is telling the reader not to do. They aren't saying "try to build twitter but skimp on the tech" they're saying "don't try to build twitter, build something where people pay you money to use it and you'll be raking in millions in profit by the time technical scaling is an issue". Terrible example imo.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#142

Post by tannhaeuser »

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.)

Yes, that's also a problem I have with my writing. My using of "eg.", "ie.", and other parentheticals (is that the right word?) is equally bad.

It might be because I first write down a sentence, then refine it to become precise like I would when writing programs (thereby making it incomprehensible eg. ruining the narrative flow).

Do you happen to know a cure (or therapy)?

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#143

Post by joe5644774 »

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…

What application did you built ?

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#144

Post by tianlins »

It really depends the type of growth. Organic growth is driven by the quality of product therefore scaling issue comes later. But most venture-backed startup services such as O2O need quickly dominate market by throwing cash to get users so scaling is an issue from day one.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#145

Post by seajones »

I do agree, but being at the "we need to scale up asap" stage atm makes it harder to. There's a balance to be struck. Maybe about approach of "who cares" with the POC, MVP etc stages, then keep it more and more in mind at each stage after that would be best.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#146

Post by spacetexas »

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…

Socket.io can't handle many connections you're right. I would use (universal) Web Sockets (This is a good abstraction library, very easy to implement).

https://github.com/primus/primus

Maybe put it on a Digitalocean Server and just reference your Dyno's IP address if possible.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#147

Post by Twisell »

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…

What you describe is more of a design flaw than a scaling issue.

Thinking ahead that custom fields could be needed in the future is a design choice and can apply to 5k users or 500 000k users. It's not the scaling itself that causing you pain, it just exacerbate the difficulty of a bad design choice.

So advice of OP still apply, at start you should take most of your time develloping the best design for your application and less on scaling. Because scaling a good design is way less painful.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#148

Post by mk89 »

salman89 wrote: post #112

I agree with the general premise of avoiding premature optimizations, but designing systems that scale is important for several reasons: - Startups grow exponentially, if you're playing catchup as you're growing you are focusing on keeping the lights on and hanging on for the ride. Important for a growing company to focus on vision. - Software that scales in traffic is easier to scale in engineering effort. For examp…

I totally agree with you on all the points.

I think it takes experienced managers and developers with business-oriented mindset to achieve the best compromise. Saying "there is no need to overengineer now" can be as bad as months of overengineering. It all depends on the business.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#149

Post by john61 »

timewarrior wrote: post #81
john61 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time is the only currency you have which can't be earned and only spent. I would argue that you can earn lifetime with a healthy life style. I remember to have read a study that measured the average difference between healthy and unhealthy life styles with 14 years. If you spend 1 day a week more for a healthy lifestyle (exercise, self cooking, enough sleep, little stress, enough recreation time) for 40 years you h…

You make a great point. Health should be the topmost priority and I need to get better at it. However to my original point - you can lose fitness (within reasonable limits) and then gain it back and not notice a difference later on. However time lost is lost forever.

Yes you can have a life style debt. But do not overload it or forget to pay it back.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#150

Post by badminton1 »

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 think in your particular case, you had a good intuition about performance/scalability and this is why it was not hard for you to scale. However this is not the case for everyone and I have seen many counterexamples in my career.
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