Ok, but does it scale?
spacetimedb.com
Ok, but does it scale?
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#2[dead]
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#3I had a coworker that would always ask this, like a javelin thrown in the bicycle spokes of every demo.
We hoped for tens of users.
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#4I had a coworker that would always ask this, like a javelin thrown in the bicycle spokes of every demo. We hoped for tens of users.
I was waiting for a comment like this. It's not like there aren't any projects that should be thinking about "scale", but it's almost a meme at this point. There is even the section there near the beginning about how small web apps without many users 'may have to think about horizontal scaling as well' - no, no they don't. To take part in the meme as well, a single server with Postgres will suffice for what? 99% of companies?
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#5The intro section is a good summary of why distributed SQL databases (Spanner, roach, Yugabyte, TiDB) haven't taken off in the market in the same way as say distributed data warehouses have (Snowflake, Databricks, FabricDW, Clickhouse, etc.).
I would add a few other things to the list of scaling problems. Some SQL features are hard to scale out (auto_increment/serial columns, unique secondary keys, foreign keys, etc.). Some SQL query operators are hard to scale out for OLTP queries that want low latency and high throughput (DISTINCT, LIMIT/TOP-N, non-collocated joins). I take it SpacetimeDB is a nosql database, so these problems are less important to them?
As to how spacetimedb plans to scale out, I didn't follow it fully. It's hard to take the spacetimedb folks seriously (see: https://strn.cat/posts/spacetime/).
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#6I had a coworker that would always ask this, like a javelin thrown in the bicycle spokes of every demo. We hoped for tens of users.
Yeah, I just always say 'it sure does!' ; not like people who make remarks like that will try / know how to try anyway. And if they do, even the largest prototypey crap we make can do 10-100x what sales/marketing expects (and they overshoot estimates always).
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#7From what I understand, they are building out an MMO using spacetime. Sort of dogfooding it. Not saying that means it scales, but at least they will experience the painpoints just like anyone else using it
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#8Me and Fable when the boss starts asking why my custom handrolled data engine needs to run on m6i.16xlarge for our 100 users.
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#9[flagged]
Re: Ok, but does it scale?
#10The intro section is a good summary of why distributed SQL databases (Spanner, roach, Yugabyte, TiDB) haven't taken off in the market in the same way as say distributed data warehouses have (Snowflake, Databricks, FabricDW, Clickhouse, etc.). I would add a few other things to the list of scaling problems. Some SQL features are hard to scale out (auto_increment/serial columns, unique secondary keys, foreign keys, etc.…
I'm a cofounder of SpacetimeDB (and the author of OPs article). The https://strn.cat/posts/spacetime/ article has several substantial errors. I've spoken with Vicent directly about them.
Most notably, almost the entire commentary about durability is incorrect. SpacetimeDB does not acknowledge anything before data is fully persisted to disk, even though he claims it does. Clients CAN chose to listen before that, but you can do the same thing in Postgres if you want.
There is no 50 ms delay to writing to disk. The article is mostly nonsense.
Ask Claude yourself: https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB
He spent 15 minutes looking at our code (by his own admission), having never written a database storage engine before AFAIK, and made a pronouncement that SpacetimeDB wasn't a good database. Crazy stuff.