It’s possibly much more. http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf Demonstrates, and it is totally in line with

It’s possibly much more. http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf Demonstrates, and it is totally in line with my experience, that using common scaling mechanisms has an immediate x10-x100 cost before you start to realize the (almost linear) scale in the number of machines. Just adding Hadoop costs you x10; to go 100 times faster (compared to one machine properly written without Hadoop) you need 1000. Common web app scaling is not quite as bad, but it is quite bad. Philip Greenspan had shown back in 1997 with the original arsDigita system that one machine hosting db+web could do better than the then-prevalent multi-machine deployment. That’s still correct (and still mostly ignored in scalability discussions cause it is boring and requires thinking ahead).