4 ms·
> 2 requests per second Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.
by teej 16y ago
> 2 requests per second
Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.
- vog 16y agoDo you care to elaborate?
- cellis 16y agoTraffic is bursty, not smooth.
- teej 16y agoTaking daily pageviews and dividing it by 24 * 60 * 60 assumes your traffic curve isn't a curve at all - it's flat. For your average US-based consumer web app it's highly unlikely to have just as many people using your app at 3am as you do 3pm. When scaling a web app, you need to prepare for peak usage, not average usage. Here are a few first-hand examples. Friends for Sale, a social game, had ~10M daily pageviews (100 req/sec avg) but had peak load of > 200 req/sec. Ideeli, a "flash sale" designer shopping site, typically had peak load 5x-20x higher than median load. Regardless of what Quora's traffic curve looks like, wheels' point still stand - it doesn't matter what backend you're using for 60k users on a web app. -------------- http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-mil...
- zepolen 16y agoSo worst case they will be doing 4 req/s instead of 2. I know what you're trying to say, but at Quora's numbers, as OP said, it truly is irrelevant.
- rmah 16y agoThere's an entire branch of mathematics that covers this. It's called "queuing theory". It's pretty strait forward to find the probability of N requests per second for an M/M/1 system. Then you decide, "I want to be able to handle the 99.9% case" (or whatever) and you know what your peak capacity has to be.