

Ask HN: Why can't Tumblr stay up? - emilepetrone


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dieselz
Anyone looking at their situation is probably saying "with all the resources
they have, they should be able to build a system that could stay up." This is
true. Its likely that if they could start from scratch, their team could put
together a system that would be able to handle the traffic they are seeing and
expect to see in the future. The problem is getting the legacy systems to the
point where they can scale. It's one thing to have a platform that handles 10s
of thousands requests per day. Now convert that system into one that handles
100s of millions of requests daily. Thats a tall order.

Developers which are involved with a product early are typically more
interested in building a viable product, not getting it to "web-scale," and
rightfully so.

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spooneybarger
Are you hoping for a response from a tumblr engineer or just some idle
speculation and gossip?

~~~
emilepetrone
A technical response would be valuable to the community. Too often we accept
poor performance without questioning what is going on - and learning from it.

It's a valid question. Please don't be so cynical. Thanks

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veb
I see quite often people talk about 'good practices' in web-programming but
generally say "don't worry about scale issues... if it becomes an issue,
you've just beaten 90% of other startups" umm, isn't this a bad practice?
Because when you _do_ start worrying, it's gonna be a bitch to fix...

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pinksoda
Why would this be a bad practice? This is a GOOD practice. You don't want to
add months to the development time before you know if it's going to get
traction.

I've had several successful sites, but dozens more failures and I'm glad I
didn't waste the time making them all easily scalable; they simply didn't need
it.

~~~
veb
I'm just wondering what happens when suddenly you're growing incredibly fast,
and you simply do not have the development/money to keep up with the volume of
traffic, how does one get on top?

~~~
spooneybarger
that is a better problem to have then shipping too late to matter.

~~~
veb
Fair point.

