
Scalability vs. Performance: it isn't a battle - nostrademons
http://www.lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/91-Scalability-vs.-Performance-it-isnt-a-battle.html
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brlewis
I don't think his point carries very far. Look, people are running large,
successful web sites using PHP. What more proof do you need that performance
is irrelevant?

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nostrademons
I don't think performance is irrelevant at all.

However, the "sweet spot" for acquisitions seems to be when your business
reaches the 20-100 server range. LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Meebo, Flickr, etc.
all seem to be around that size.

That's precisely the range where scalability _does_ matter and performance
_doesn't_. You've outgrown the put-web-and-DB-on-separate-boxes-and-replicate
approach, so you actually have to think about partitioning & shared-nothing.
But 30 servers @ $200/month/server is only about $6000/month, the cost of a
single employee. At this stage, it doesn't really make sense to sacrifice
developer hours for operational costs.

If you get to be really big, it makes a whole lot more sense. 100,000 servers
@ $200/month/server = $20M/month, more than the purchase price of a small
smartup. At this point, it makes a lot of sense to put a team of a half-dozen
or so programmers onto the problem of speeding up individual server
performance. If you can double performance, you save $10M/month, which'll pay
wages for close to 1000 programmers.

There's a reason why Google writes all their performance-critical stuff in
C++.

