I don't mean to cherrypick, but Reddit's database situation is highly abnormal and not desirable. They hacked up a spitshined Postgres-driven KV Store that is

I don't mean to cherrypick, but Reddit's database situation is highly abnormal and not desirable. They hacked up a spitshined Postgres-driven KV Store that is little more than cpickle->textarea plus an index. Their database infrastructure is a major source of their pains and why they have to be creative with the caching side. It doesn't help that the content is low latency and write heavy, more so than Facebook streams would be, I imagine since people aren't screaming into the void, but actually carrying on a conversation. It's a damn good thing Reddit has a proper queue setup.