Ask HN: Databases/disk access for server-side apps - still a bottleneck?

[vanilla-almond]

I've read many times in comments here on Hacker News that the speed of your server-side programming language matters much less than the speed of your database or disk access. Given that SSDs are now commonly used by many hosting providers - is database/disk access still a bottleneck for server-side web apps?

[esaym]

Are you doing more than 300 transactions per second? If not then don't worry about it...

I say '300' because just a few years ago we were doing that on (a poorly tuned) DB2 on top of an 8 disk array on Netapp over NFS... Worked Fine™

[nwrk]

Vary on your application.

- you can fit all or portion of your database into memory

- you can utilize cache layer (redis, memcache) to bypass database access

- you can use certain databases on GPU if db is still bottleneck