Interesting. I'm an indie Facebook developer. My most popular app has over 8 million monthly uniques and 350 million pageviews. I didn't realize how substantial said traffic was until reading this article. I scaled my app to that size on my own over the course of 12 months. I know of other FB devs who scaled bigger apps working solo. If average hackers like us can do it, anyone can. The hard part is building a popular app. Articles about scaling are a means for founders to brag about their success without giving away useful information about what made their app popular in the first place.
Alexis Ohanian has talked about what made Reddit successful many times. Steve Huffman is talking about the technical side of things. It doesn't come off as bragging to me at all.
Scalability stories are generally interesting, as they're about solving problems that out-of-the-box commercial software doesn't. They're interesting to hackers, not all of whom are entrepreneurs.
If you'd like to share a story, however, on using statistical techniques to measure and act on virality, doing multi-variate testing, et al that would be very interesting.
Different application have different scalability characteristics (how much can be cached? how much integration is there?). A certain number may look very impressive for one sort of application, but not so impressive for another.
E.g., some of Yahoo's non-search properties receive tremendous traffic but their scalability stories (while still requiring a great amount of difficult engineering work) aren't as interesting as those of Facebook or other Yahoo properties e.g., Search, Flickr.
Wow, it sounds like your app is extremely popular - that sounds like huge traffic, especially for "scaling to that size in 12 months". Right? I am naive, or is this "fairly common" with decent Facebook games?
What is your application? Are you profitable? Very profitable? (Oh god I hope you are very profitable, or some of my apps are screwed - but then again I guess it really depends on the business model and usage characteristics)
That's interesting. The guys at reddit previously compared various database systems including Amazon's SimpleDB, and found that PostgreSQL was the fastest (see 'Scaling your Python application on EC2' from PyCon 2010: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/ )
To clarify, Reddit replaced memcachedb w/ cassandra entirely, but a lot of the site is still on postgresql. My understanding is they plan to move more to Cassnadra gradually.
So many lectures on scaling are full of best-practices that are somewhat removed from reality and time/budget constraints. This lecture on the other hand has a lot of common-sense advice and solutions that may be obvious to some, but I must admit, this is going to help me (if I could get the traffic to worry about scaling...).
Joe Stump gave a similar talk at EuroDjangoCon last year (the topic is officially: dealing with a fuckload of data, but a lot of the same lessons). Unfortunately I have no idea what became of the recordings.
He says (transcript is below the video) that he left Reddit in the Fall of 2007 but continued working as a contractor until the Fall of 2009 so he doesn't really address the current events of Reddit.
That transcript is misleading. Steve stayed with reddit until Fall of 2009 when our contracts ended. He didn't leave to work as a contractor.
One thing I should also mention is that our deal was structured in such a way that either one of us could've left reddit before our contract ended without too much pain (missing some carrots, granted) but we were still rather attached to reddit, the community, and our friends (team reddit). Personally, I did also feel a compulsion to fulfill my side of the contract and make sure Condé Nast got its money's worth. That may make me a tool in the eyes of most Hacker News folks, but so be it.
When you sold the site to Condé Nast they became your customer. Looking after your customers is the number one priority of any business. So it is totally correct that you made sure they received a good product and got the best from it.
