Re:Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
by teej on Friday December 19, 2008 @10:59AM
(#403442)
He is really writing this from the perspective of web applications. If you app is humming along nicely on a single EC2 instance, it isn't even worth an HOUR of your time to DOUBLE the capacity of your app.
The last big app I was in charge of ran 1M pageviews a day on $500/month. At my standard rate, it isn't even worth a day of my time to double the capacity of my app on the same hardware.
He certainly isn't saying don't optimize. He's simply saying that scaling web apps STARTS with throwing hardware at the problem. Where and when you cut over to developer optimization depends on your -actual- costs, size, and growth.
The last big app I was in charge of ran 1M pageviews a day on $500/month. At my standard rate, it isn't even worth a day of my time to double the capacity of my app on the same hardware.
He certainly isn't saying don't optimize. He's simply saying that scaling web apps STARTS with throwing hardware at the problem. Where and when you cut over to developer optimization depends on your -actual- costs, size, and growth.