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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#191

Post by acdha »

iamd3vil wrote: post #99
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 hour…

> These services are developed by companies like TCS and Infosys

This is the real problem: lack of in-house expertise and ongoing incentives to maintain performance, while contractors are usually paid for features and, if they also do hosting, even have a financial disincentive for efficiency.

I would bet it's at least as likely that had someone thought of scaling it would have added a significant cost and delay to the actual project and the first major scalability bottleneck would still have been something unanticipated.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#192

Post by user5994461 »

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.…

> It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate.

That seems fairly reasonable to me.

It all depends on what you call "success". Running a startup from zero to a billion dollar business is an incredible and rare achievement. Running a small site with a few hundreds/thousands users and a decent income is fairly reasonable.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#194

Post by developer2 »

technosamay20 wrote: post #59
cyberferret wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mentioned something similar in a separate comment. My initial DB schema was pretty bad. We did at 2 schema rewrites and migrations from the launch to 5M users. Each time it took 2 weeks of sleep less nights. The machines today are really powerful. You can do a lot with 244 GB RAM machines backed by SSD. Someone who doesn't have the skill set to be able to scale once they get traction - it's likely they will not hav…

>> You can do a lot with 244 GB RAM machines

Is this a typo of "244 GB" instead of "24 GB"? Nearly any company that has a single machine provisioned with 244 GB of RAM is doing something severely wrong, likely putting the company's ability to grow at risk. Such a machine screams of trying to vertically scale a poorly performing legacy product instead of figuring out to horizontally scale out with 16-64 GB servers.

That much memory on a single server is a huge red flag for 95-99%+ of companies. It takes a very specialized system (ie: you probably don't fit the mold, no matter what your excuses are) to require such a server.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#195

Post by user5994461 »

acdha wrote: post #189
grey-area wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint stack overflow is hosted on windows and did just fine. If your service is printing money you can easily fix tech problems (e.g. Facebook effectively rewriting php), if it's not you may flail around trying rewrites etc but the real problem lies elsewhere. Tech people are quick to find technical reasons for failure but the reasons are usually elsewhere.

Stack Overflow seems very relevant to this conversation given how unremarkable their architecture is – their level of traffic is comfortably running on 4 MS SQL Server boxes: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... I've seen too many breathless posts which would have you believe they'd need a clustered NoSQL database or it wouldn't scale.

>>> how unremarkable their architecture is – their level of traffic is comfortably running on 4 MS SQL Server boxes:

Wrong, and wrong.

First, their architecture is extremely remarkable. They are doing and mastering vertical scaling, down to every little details. Terabytes of RAM, C# instead of Ruby/Python, FusionIO drives, MS SQL instead of MySQL/PostGre, etc...

Second, that's at least 6 database servers, each one being more expensive than 10 usual commodity servers:

First cluster: Dell R720xd servers, 384GB of RAM, 4TB of PCIe SSD space, and 2x 12 cores. It hosts the Stack Overflow, Sites (bad name, I’ll explain later), PRIZM, and Mobile databases.

Second cluster: Dell R730xd servers, 768GB of RAM, 6TB of PCIe SSD space, 2x 8 cores. This cluster runs everything else. That list includes Careers, Open ID, Chat, our Exception log, and every other Q&A site (e.g. Super User, Server Fault, etc.).

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#196

Post by hooph00p »

LanceH wrote: post #72
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.

Would it be as big if they had stopped to consider all scaling issues at the beginning?

You could argue it would be bigger. Instead of working around Travis to connect to repositories, the repositories are there. That's the biggest sell for me, anyway.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#197

Post by user5994461 »

baby wrote: post #179
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…

How much money did Twitter waste in its migration to Java? I think it's an important factor to consider.

They have thousands of people sitting around doing nothing. They don't really optimize for expenses.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#198

Post by user5994461 »

narrator wrote: post #87
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. These days there would be hardly any way to fail to scale given a large budget. The technology to do so is all so good. However, back in the day it wasn't always so. I'd say Friendster was an example of a company that failed due to scaling issues.

> The technology to do so is all so good.

Mistake #1: Took the wrong technologies.

For every technology that can scale, there is a bunch of other that will give a lot of troubles.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#199

Post by ProblemFactory »

virmundi wrote: post #14
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.

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.

> 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.

There is a major benefit to UUIDs besides server-side scaling concerns: you can generate them offline in mobile apps and other client-side applications.

With serial primary keys, you are often stuck between waiting for a server round trip before saving data locally, or inventing complicated solutions for referring to not-yet-uploaded data locally.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#200

Post by user5994461 »

std_throwaway wrote: post #151
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,…

I don't like opinionated pieces like the one presented here because while they are right about some things they miss other things and present half-truths as full-truths. In my experience (and I have little of that) it's important to know the upgrade path and adjust your planning accordingly. How many users can you serve with your solution? How big do you expect the market to be in that stage? What technology would be…

> You can probably push your solution by an order of one magnitude if you need it quickly.

You can always push a python/ruby app an order of magnitude by putting an order of magnitude more AWS instances.

It will almost always bankrupt you in the medium term.

The only place I've seen it sustainable is a place that was generating a $100 per user, and there weren't many active users either (thousands, not millions).

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