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Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

darrenhorrocks.co.uk

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Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#4

Post by zimpenfish »

At a previous job, there was an argument over a code review where I had done some SQL queries that fixed a problem but were not optimal. The other side were very much "this won't work for 1000 devices! we will not approve it!" whereas my stance was "we have a maximum of 25 devices deployed by our only customer who is going to leave us next week unless we fix this problem today". One of the most disheartening weeks of my software development life.

(that was also the place I had to have a multi-day argument over the precise way to define constants in Perl because they varied in performance except it was a long running mod_perl server process and the constants were only defined at startup and it made absolutely zero difference once it had been running for an hour or more.)

Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#7

Post by b112 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #4

At a previous job, there was an argument over a code review where I had done some SQL queries that fixed a problem but were not optimal. The other side were very much "this won't work for 1000 devices! we will not approve it!" whereas my stance was "we have a maximum of 25 devices deployed by our only customer who is going to leave us next week unless we fix this problem today". One of the most disheartening weeks of…

I actually like having room for optimization, especially when running my own infra servers included.

As an example, I can think of half a dozen things I can currently optimize just in the DB layer, but my time is being spent (sensibly!) in other areas that are customer facing and directly impacting them.

So fix what needs to be fixed, but if there was a major load spike due to onboarding of new clients/users, I could in a matter of hours have the DB handling 100x the traffic. That's a nice ace in the back of my pocket.

And yes, if I had endless time I'd have resolved all issues.

Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#9

Post by zimpenfish »

b112 wrote: post #7
zimpenfish wrote: post #4

At a previous job, there was an argument over a code review where I had done some SQL queries that fixed a problem but were not optimal. The other side were very much "this won't work for 1000 devices! we will not approve it!" whereas my stance was "we have a maximum of 25 devices deployed by our only customer who is going to leave us next week unless we fix this problem today". One of the most disheartening weeks of…

I actually like having room for optimization, especially when running my own infra servers included. As an example, I can think of half a dozen things I can currently optimize just in the DB layer, but my time is being spent (sensibly!) in other areas that are customer facing and directly impacting them. So fix what needs to be fixed, but if there was a major load spike due to onboarding of new clients/users, I could…

> if there was a major load spike due to onboarding of new clients/users

This company was a hardware company with reasonably complex installation procedures - even going full whack, I doubt they could have added more than 20 new devices a week (and even then there'd be a hefty lead time to get the stuff manufactured and shipped etc.)

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