Re:Scalability Is Overrated
by lelanthran on Sunday February 05, 2023 @02:40AM
(#34662805)
> It really depends on the situation. No one at a successful startup says, we spent too much time on scalability in the beginning. They probably say the opposite.
Depends. No one at a unicorn says that, but I've seen plenty of startups that.
The unicorn is the outlier, not the rule.
> I worked at one company that we couldn’t rack servers fast enough to keep up with our growth. Our competitor who was the market leader had to turn off the ability for new customers to signup to prevent their site from crashing under load. We ended up surpassing them.
Were they still in business at the end of all this? Because it turned out you made a bet, and it came through. The odds are against this, though.
> Getting a million customers isn’t that challenging and really a function of money. With $50 CPA, you just need $50m. 1m customers will take down most sites unless you do some optimizations.
A million in what time period, and what are the usage patterns? Because from what I've seen, as long as the backend isn't in Python, Ruby, PHP or similar, a single hosted server easily vertically scaled to handle more than 2m million users, because it a) didn't need to handle 2m concurrent connections, and b) usage patterns were infrequent enough (users interacted only every few minutes at most).
Depends. No one at a unicorn says that, but I've seen plenty of startups that. The unicorn is the outlier, not the rule.
> I worked at one company that we couldn’t rack servers fast enough to keep up with our growth. Our competitor who was the market leader had to turn off the ability for new customers to signup to prevent their site from crashing under load. We ended up surpassing them.
Were they still in business at the end of all this? Because it turned out you made a bet, and it came through. The odds are against this, though.
> Getting a million customers isn’t that challenging and really a function of money. With $50 CPA, you just need $50m. 1m customers will take down most sites unless you do some optimizations.
A million in what time period, and what are the usage patterns? Because from what I've seen, as long as the backend isn't in Python, Ruby, PHP or similar, a single hosted server easily vertically scaled to handle more than 2m million users, because it a) didn't need to handle 2m concurrent connections, and b) usage patterns were infrequent enough (users interacted only every few minutes at most).