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Most startups, if they approached scaling like mature enterprises, would never have the opportunity to become a mature enterprise.

ericb 18y ago
I agree with you--my point was not that twitter should have initially approached scaling like large enterprises do--only that as a natural consequence of smallness, small companies don't and aren't in the habit. Twitter now has the resources and real user load. The window where performance problems are permissible closes eventually--see Friendster. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. But when your userbase is threatening to leave and dreaming up alternatives on their blogs daily, it's hard to call it premature.
- swombat 18y ago
  You're making it sound like so-called "mature enterprises" approach scaling in a mature way. Perhaps "enterprises" like Yahoo, Amazon and Google do, but I worked in a very mature investment bank for 4 years and though they had some load testing, none of the systems I ever saw built were prepared to handle a load that might grow by a factor of 10 in a year. In fact, most of them struggled to slowly deliver even with the current load. That's true for both internal bank systems and external client-facing ones.
  - ericb 18y ago
    So your company does load testing. I didn't claim every big company tests adequately, or even has a process in place, so lets put straw men away. Consider apps like major hosted tax apps on tax day (Quicken, H&R block, etc.). Consider the load they are under--a substantial portion of the US files their taxes in a 12 hour period. It makes twitter look wimpy. And they release what is essentially a rewrite every year. How do they make something so critical work under a massive load their app has yet to undergo, in advance, while twitter fails? Load that grows 100x in a year can be modeled, estimated, and simulated and the software can be tuned and hardware scaled in advance. They manage it. We have the technology.

ericb 18y ago

I agree with you--my point was not that twitter should have initially approached scaling like large enterprises do--only that as a natural consequence of smallness, small companies don't and aren't in the habit. Twitter now has the resources and real user load. The window where performance problems are permissible closes eventually--see Friendster. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. But when your userbase is threatening to leave and dreaming up alternatives on their blogs daily, it's hard to call it premature.

swombat 18y ago
You're making it sound like so-called "mature enterprises" approach scaling in a mature way. Perhaps "enterprises" like Yahoo, Amazon and Google do, but I worked in a very mature investment bank for 4 years and though they had some load testing, none of the systems I ever saw built were prepared to handle a load that might grow by a factor of 10 in a year. In fact, most of them struggled to slowly deliver even with the current load. That's true for both internal bank systems and external client-facing ones.
- ericb 18y ago
  So your company does load testing. I didn't claim every big company tests adequately, or even has a process in place, so lets put straw men away. Consider apps like major hosted tax apps on tax day (Quicken, H&R block, etc.). Consider the load they are under--a substantial portion of the US files their taxes in a 12 hour period. It makes twitter look wimpy. And they release what is essentially a rewrite every year. How do they make something so critical work under a massive load their app has yet to undergo, in advance, while twitter fails? Load that grows 100x in a year can be modeled, estimated, and simulated and the software can be tuned and hardware scaled in advance. They manage it. We have the technology.