4 ms·
> Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users. Yep. > Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw mo
by ssalazar 11y ago
> Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users.
Yep.
> Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
Yeah not really. The CAP theorem is going to bite you if you just buy more servers. Twitter suffered huge growing pains as it tried to scale after becoming mainstream--remember the "fail whale?" Facebook completely re-engineered PHP to address performance and scale issues.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoHmm, maybe using 'throwing money at the problem' was a poor choice, it's not quite what I meant. But yeah, Facebook had enough money they could hire people to work full-time on writing a PHP-to-C++ compiler. It's the sort of hack that typifies Facebook.