
Ask HN: What do you consider as a big web application - dzonga
What&#x27;s your personal metric, to consider a web application as big and complex ? Is it the number of models, or background processing logic. Or for those in the micro-services camp, is it the number of services. Or something else entirely
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arthtyagi
I've been building a Django web project for a while now, it has several
modules, started out with two, now it has around 5. But that's not the point,
right? It kind of is. A simple project with a dozen modules within it can be
complex in terms of memory usage whereas a single app that performs various
asynchronous tasks can be complex in terms of CPU usage. What I'm trying to
say here is that everyone's metric differs on what a complex application. To
me and probably a lot of people, a web app getting 10000 requests a day is
small-scale but along the upper lines of small scale and can be considered
medium scale if it's something along the line of a web application like a
video hosting service that just took off. Time since the site is up also
matters. And yeah, both the number of models and background processing logic
matters in defining a complex application. Refer to my first paragraph. As for
microservices, the more clusters you have, the more complex your service gets
and the more the database get requests ( GET, POST, PUT, DELETE ), the more
your project would need to scale. In conclusion, the complexity of an
application depends on CPU Usage ( having to use 2 VCPUs with 16 Gb of ram
within a month of usage by 10000 people daily is a rough idea of what complex
could look like but there is really no definition that defines where complex
starts, a lot of factors matter ), Memory Usage, Database usage, Data Transfer
and more.

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dzonga
using django too. and thank for the explanation.

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arthtyagi
django really seems to be the trend right now ( not saying there aren't other
good and popular frameworks, ofc there are I'm just saying that it's one of
those atm ) which ultimately means a whole generation of websites built using
Django and in turn enormous support available over the years.

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njsubedi
Everything you mentioned, and how long it takes to pinpoint how a particular
thing (route/controller) works when something breaks. Also any monolith is
usually "big" enough for me.

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PaulHoule
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point)

