Re:Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software
by waboremo on Sunday June 18, 2023 @02:56PM
(#36383190)
Even then, you don't have to throw money at the problem right away. If you feel you can save time and money by using Rust instead of PHP (just using the two languages as examples, not a specific indication of Rust or PHP's resource drain), go ahead. Making that decision early on costs nothing.
It's only after a project is off the ground that caring about these decisions winds up wasting everyone's time, that's when you wind up slowing momentum tremendously due to dangling a potential new toy in front of your team.
I'd say they underestimate how long "just throwing money" (servers) at the problem can work.
If you earn decent money now, scaling number of app servers 10x times to serve 10x times the traffic will still earn decent money. Doesn't matter that "PHP is slow", deal with it when your infrastructure cost warrant hiring more/better developers to fix it.
Especially now. Pair of fat servers on some NVMes and 1TB of RAM gonna cost you less than few dev-months and that can serve plenty of users in most use cases even before any extra caching will be needed.