Really like the curiosity and thought behind this article. Couple of thoughts: >probably upwards of 80% of my time is spent on things I wouldn’t need to do if

Really like the curiosity and thought behind this article. Couple of thoughts: >probably upwards of 80% of my time is spent on things I wouldn’t need to do if it weren’t distributed. Sure. Do it on one giant machine. Then you'll be spending 80% of your time doing things you wouldn't need to do if it weren't monolithic. At the end of the day, if your customer is on the other end of the internet, then all of those complaints apply. If you solve that by running an app on their device, then oh boy are you going to have fun testing. I prefer scaling out. The stackoverflow peeps prefer scaling up. There are some great write-ups about how they scale. I found this [1] one after some quick googling, but I am certain there are more. So it's really about choose your poison. >I think people should be more willing to try and write performance-sensitive code as a (potentially multi-threaded) process on one machine in a fast language if it’ll fit rather than try and distribute a slower implementation over multiple machines. Sure. I once replaced a system that ran on 10 32-core machines with one that ran on one with four cores on one machine and did the work in the same time. Another time I had 96 cores, more threads, and I replaced it with one that had three threads and was faster. But both of those solutions were evolutionary dead-ends. The tasks were very specific, and not subject to change. The first one was a single C file. The latter was actually java, but with hand-rolled hash tables and optimistic locks. The first one I doubt I could follow it now. My point is, you can have understandable systems that good people (as opposed to geniuses) can work on, evolve and adapt, and that have well understood failure modes and scaling cliffs. Or you can have bonkers code that everyone is afraid to touch, and which fails in production when it hit a cliff you didn't know about and now your site is dead for eight days. If you can strike a good balance, then you'll probably have some combination of distributed, and brute force. [1] http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture