Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

stepchange.work

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 96 posts

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#61

Post by cultofmetatron »

danmaz74 wrote: post #38
pajeets wrote: post #7

Postgres can be scaled vertically like Stackoverflow did. With cache on edge for popular reads if you absolutely must (but you most likely dont). No need to microservice or sync read replicas even (unless you are making a game). No load balancers. Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels for heavy real world apps (99% of you wont ever run into this issue) Seriously its so create scalable backend services with postgres…

Having at least 2 web servers and a read-only DB replica for redundancy/high availability is very easy and much safer. Yes, setting up a single-server is faster, but if your DB server dies - and at some point it will happen - you'll not just save a lot of downtime, but also a lot of stress and additional work.

my startup has a similar setup (elixir + postgres). we use aurora so we get automated failover. its more expensive but its just a cost of doing business.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#62

Post by charlie0 »

ainiriand wrote: post #36
petcat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

We use 5 ec2 instances to serve around 32 million requests per day on PHP, all under 100ms. It is not the language.

Framework or custom app?

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#63

Post by dilyevsky »

ainiriand wrote: post #36
petcat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

We use 5 ec2 instances to serve around 32 million requests per day on PHP, all under 100ms. It is not the language.

Sounds impressive until you realize that there’s 86400 seconds in a day and so even if majority of those happen during business hours thats still firmly under 200 qps per server. On modern hw that’s very small. Also what instance size?

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#64

Post by dilyevsky »

danmaz74 wrote: post #41
petcat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

"without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill". The point is that you don't need AWS for this! You can use Docker to configure much , much cheaper/faster physical servers from Hetzner or similar with super-simple automated failover, and you absolutely don't need an expensive dedicated OPS team for that for this kind of simple deployments, as I read so often here on HN. You might get surprised as how far you can g…

You ain’t replacing 250k/mo worth of ec2 with a single hetzner server so your “super-simple failover” option goes out the window. Baremetal is not that much faster if you’re running ruby on it, dont fall for the marketing.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#65

Post by Lio »

hamandcheese wrote: post #43
ainiriand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really do not know what you are talking about, it is not about the language, like it was repeated in this forum many many times already. We serve an application in PHP to thousands of users per second in less than 100ms constantly.

Sometimes it is the language. Or at least the ecosystem and libraries available. My go-to example is graphql-ruby, which really chokes serializing complex object graphs (or did, it's been a while now since I've had to use it). It is pretty easy to consume 100s of ms purely on compute to serialize a complex graphql response.

I have mixed feelings about this. It's saying that python is too slow for data science ignoring that python can outsource that work to Pandas or NumPy.

For GraphQL on Rails you can avoid graphql-ruby and use Agoo[1] instead so that that work is outsourced to C. So in practice it's not a problem.

1. https://github.com/ohler55/agoo

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#66

Post by jylasdfasd »

ainiriand wrote: post #36
petcat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

We use 5 ec2 instances to serve around 32 million requests per day on PHP, all under 100ms. It is not the language.

This is trivial with epoll(7) or io_uring(7). What you are describing "5 ec2 instances" could likely be attributed to language and/or framework bloat but hard to know for certain without details.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#67

Post by sparker72678 »

petcat wrote: post #28
benwilber0 wrote: post #27

Postgres can scale to millions of users, but Rails definitely can't. Unless you're prepared to spend a ton of money.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

Were they running t2.micro instances or something?

We're running 270k+ RPM no sweat, and our spend for those containers is maybe 1/100th what you're quoting there.

The idea that Rails can't handle high load is just such bloody nonsense.

You can build an abomination with any framework, if you try.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#68

Post by dcchambers »

petcat wrote: post #28
benwilber0 wrote: post #27

Postgres can scale to millions of users, but Rails definitely can't. Unless you're prepared to spend a ton of money.

For real. Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill. I've worked at unicorn companies trying to do exactly that. Their baseline was 800 instances of the Rails app...lol. I'm not going to name-names (you've heard of them) ... but this is a company that had to invent an entirely new and novel deployment process in order to get new code…

> Show me a company that has scaled RoR or Django to 1 million concurrent users without blowing $250,000/month on their AWS bill.

Can you deploy something to vercel that supports a million concurrent users for less than $250K/month? What about using AWS Lambdas? Go microservices running in K8s?

I think your infra bills are going to skyrocket no matter your software stack if you're serving 1 million+ concurrent users.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#69

Post by gls2ro »

datadeft wrote: post #33

Scaling a non-scalabe by default framework that should have been few services written in a performance first language at a billion+ USD company. I am not sure why are we boliling the oceans for the sake of a language like Ruby and a framework like Rails. I love those to death but Amazons approach is much better (or it used to be): you can't make a service for 10.000+ users in anything else than: C++, Java (probably R…

You are connecting the dots backwards, but a project is usually trying to connect the dots forward.

So if you have a lot of money then you can start implementing from scratch your own web framework in C. It will be the perfect framework for your own product and you can put 50 dev/sec/ops/* on the team to make sure both the framework and product code are written.

But some (probably most) products are started with 1-2 people trying to find product market fit or whatever name is for solving a real problem for paying users as fast as they can. And then delegate scaling for when money are going in.

This is similar because this is about a startup/product bought by Microsoft and not built inhouse.

For fast delivery of stable secure code for web apps Rails is a perfect fit. I am not saying the only one but there are not that many offering the stability and batteries included to deliver with a small team a web app that can scale to product market fit while keeping the team small.

Re: Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft

#70

Post by pajeets »

whakim wrote: post #46
pajeets wrote: post #7

Postgres can be scaled vertically like Stackoverflow did. With cache on edge for popular reads if you absolutely must (but you most likely dont). No need to microservice or sync read replicas even (unless you are making a game). No load balancers. Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels for heavy real world apps (99% of you wont ever run into this issue) Seriously its so create scalable backend services with postgres…

Yes, scaling vertically is much easier than scaling horizontally and dealing with replicas, caching, etc. But that certainly has limits and shouldn’t be taken as gospel, and is also way more expensive when you’re starting to deal with terabytes of RAM. I also find it very difficult to trust your advice when you’re telling folks to stick Postgres on a VPS - for almost any real organization using a managed database wil…

looking at hetzner benchmarks i would say VPS are quite enough to handle Postgres for Alexa Top 1000. When you approach under top 100, you will need more RAM than what is offered.

But my point is you won't ever hit this type of traffic. You don't even need Kafka to handle streams of logs from a fleet of generators from the wild. Postgres just works.

In general, the problem with modern backend architectural thinking is that it treats database as some unreliable bottleneck but that is an old fashioned belief.

Vast majority of HN users and startups are not going to be servicing more than 1 million transactions per second. Even a medium sized VPS from Digital Ocean running Postgres can handle that load just fine.

Postgres is very fast and efficient and you dont need to build your architecture around problems you wont ever hit and prepay that premium for that <0.1% peak that happens so infrequently (unless you are a bank and receive fines for that).

Post reply on HN