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A comment on Building a highly-available web service without a database. Parent comment

Re:Building a highly-available web service without a database by cultofmetatron on Saturday August 10, 2024 @07:57AM (#41208855)
it was a different time. to my knowledge, viaweb was a series of common lisp instances. All states for a user session was held IN MEMORY on the individual machine. I remember reading somewhere that they would be on a call with a user on production and patch bugs in real time while they were on the phone.

The web has gotten bigger and a lot of these practices simply would not fly today. If I was pushing a live fix on our prod machine with the amount of testing doing it live while on the customer is on the phone entails today, a good portion of you would be questioning my sanity.

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Re:Building a highly-available web service without a database by Zak on Saturday August 10, 2024 @10:01AM (#41209582)
An important reason that practice wasn't as reckless as it sounds is that early Viaweb was just a page builder. The actual web stores its customers were building were static HTML, so updating a customer's instance while talking to them on the phone only affected that one user's backend.
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