

Top Internet Startup Scalability Killers - hshah
http://gigaom.com/2009/12/20/top-10-internet-startup-scalability-killers/

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kevinholesh
In my mind, scalability is the best problem a startup could ever have.

It means people demand your product so much that you need to concentrate on
making more and more of your product. Definitely better than too little
demand.

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strlen
It depends on what you do. Scalability is about building a system to handle
ten fold more traffic than it's seeing now; <10 is too little, 100 is over-
engineering (and nearly impossible).

Now imagine a graph data structure (any site with a news-feed/following
functionality). You can get 10x increase in edges without a 10x increase
vertices.

Some kind of products also increase in usefulness (and demand) _as_ they
increase in user growth, so solving scalability problems is necessary to their
success. It isn't, however, sufficient.

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gfodor
You could just prune away everything except these:

\- Retain competent people

\- Fire incompetent people

\- Get out of their way

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rbranson
Totally agree. I don't think anyone would have looked at LAMP 5 years ago and
say it's scalable, but Facebook did it, in steps, because they had very
talented engineers. I found the point of "don't use a relational database"
ironic considering they contrasted Friendster and Facebook. Facebook uses
MySQL as their backing store. While they might not use it in the traditional
way, they most certainly evolved from joins and normalization to their current
scheme as a sharded object store as it became critical to their growth.

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ams6110
The point was not "don't use a database"; the problem identified was
"inappropriate use of a database." And that is a problem which is much larger
in scope than the simplistic examples discussed in this piece.

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sokoloff
Seemingly far more people are concerned with the scalability of their startup
than the viability of it. I'm coming up blank with a startup that would have
been successful but was killed off by scaling issues. (Twitter may have come
the closest...)

