These type of articles are always fun, though I mistakenly thought they meant Discord was running on a single hardware server, that would be fun to read. Though considering they run on BEAM they can spread out the workload plenty. Still, I remember when the hard limit for a Discord used to be 1 million, and then along came MidJourney.

It's funny how in hindsight simple changes to major web applications have a major impact. I remember, Tumblr used to show you every statistic about your blog on the dashboard, that meant every single time someone hit the front-page they had to query the latest data to show you your follower count. Sometime after they removed it from the Dashboard, I noticed Tumblr went offline / down significantly less, I doubt that was the only optimization they did, but I presume they did loads of optimizations to their platform at the time.

Yeah, statistical things like that need to be pre-calculated and cached for best performance.

When you first get stuff working doing a query is easier and faster. At some point you remove it and move to counters that are updated via your data pipe.

After I opened the link, there was a big chunk of text about AI, then a popup asking me to subscribe appeared, and I closed the tab.

It is important to node here that by "Server" they mean the Discord logical server concept which may more generically be called a "community", "group" or "workspace". It has nothing to do with the physical compute architecture.

So a title that would make sense to people not familiar with Discord terminology could be:

> How Discord Serves 15M Members of a Single Workspace

I thought for a moment that was one mighty machine.

Guild is the internal name and is used on other platforms. "workspace" sounds a bit comically serious to me in the context of Discord.

The original source, the discord article [0], gives the same information, but with imo better explanations and no AI stuff at the top

[0] https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...