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If Twitter couldn't keep up with scaling then it wasn't being architected to scale, only to grow. There are financial systems that handle millions of transacti

• liquidgecka 9y ago
  Yea but those designers knew the magnitudes that they were dealing with and built them into every single layer of the system. Its easy to build a system that handles "x million transactions a second". Its MUCH harder to build a system that handles somewhere between x, and x*100 million messages a second. Especially when in startup mode because cost and complexity matter greatly. Ultimately it wasn't "build a db that handles x writes" though. That is actually a fairly known and solvable problem. Our issue was that we were migrating from a design model that encouraged rabid development by using existing patterns to a model that would scale up much better but required a lot more planning and design, all while dealing with management that expected the feature development cycle to not slow down at all during or after the transition.