Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by user5994461 on Sunday April 09, 2017 @07:50AM
(#14071826)
There is scaling and there is scaling.
A messaging service is the most trivial service one can make, it's a well known easy problem that's been solved for decades with current technologies. There is no challenge in that. For comparison, WhatsApp had people with experience and they could handle 1 billion users with 50 people.
The fact that you can handle 10M users with a single untuned MySQL database is not a demonstration that scaling is overrated. It's an expression than you are running a trivial service that doesn't do much.
Almost any problems will be more challenging than that. There are endless companies that have 1/100th the customer base and yet require 100 times the data volume and engineering.
A messaging service is the most trivial service one can make, it's a well known easy problem that's been solved for decades with current technologies. There is no challenge in that. For comparison, WhatsApp had people with experience and they could handle 1 billion users with 50 people.
The fact that you can handle 10M users with a single untuned MySQL database is not a demonstration that scaling is overrated. It's an expression than you are running a trivial service that doesn't do much.
Almost any problems will be more challenging than that. There are endless companies that have 1/100th the customer base and yet require 100 times the data volume and engineering.