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Yep - we did a largish (300K user) site 18 years ago in PHP and static HTML. Was pretty high scale at the time with a lot of complexity and state (mysql with re

Yep - we did a largish (300K user) site 18 years ago in PHP and static HTML. Was pretty high scale at the time with a lot of complexity and state (mysql with read replicas at the time). We didn't have concurrency totally solved but it wasn't critical and the thing ran great. If you looked at the html so so simple. HTML / CSS. I don't even think we did javascript at the time? The toolchains now to just do the most basic form with a submit button - it's wild.

memco 5y ago
> The toolchains now to just do the most basic form with a submit button Oh how I long for a submit button and a form. I’ve worked on code where there’s just a bunch of divs and input fields: no form no action, no fieldsets, no labels, no submit button. I do not have words for the emotions it causes.
still_grokking 5y ago
And don't forget what you paid back then for hosting. Compare to all those Kubernetes clusters on the cloud for all those microservices that are totally needed today to operate such a large site for one third of a million users correctly. And maybe it would make even sense to talk about build and deployment times back than.
- d00bianista 5y ago
  Back in the day... I used to maintain and manually scale a platform that ran a regionally large social site. It was written in PHP, by two geeks in a dorm, served by Apache and had a single MySQL database and host, in a respectable datacenter. At it's greatest moment, it had a pair of keepalived-hosts in front of around 7 Apache hosts and still that single database host. That was expensive, but not in maintenance. The amount of moving parts in that, compared to all the doohickeys of modern times, seems like 1:100. As someone who understands very little of modern web-doohickeys, I'm very afraid of the direction we are going in and it seems like my job-security is quite high, because schools don't produce infrastructure people any more... Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer.
  - tasogare 5y ago
    > Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer. Love that punchline, it summed it all.

memco 5y ago

> The toolchains now to just do the most basic form with a submit button Oh how I long for a submit button and a form. I’ve worked on code where there’s just a bunch of divs and input fields: no form no action, no fieldsets, no labels, no submit button. I do not have words for the emotions it causes.

still_grokking 5y ago

And don't forget what you paid back then for hosting. Compare to all those Kubernetes clusters on the cloud for all those microservices that are totally needed today to operate such a large site for one third of a million users correctly. And maybe it would make even sense to talk about build and deployment times back than.

d00bianista 5y ago
Back in the day... I used to maintain and manually scale a platform that ran a regionally large social site. It was written in PHP, by two geeks in a dorm, served by Apache and had a single MySQL database and host, in a respectable datacenter. At it's greatest moment, it had a pair of keepalived-hosts in front of around 7 Apache hosts and still that single database host. That was expensive, but not in maintenance. The amount of moving parts in that, compared to all the doohickeys of modern times, seems like 1:100. As someone who understands very little of modern web-doohickeys, I'm very afraid of the direction we are going in and it seems like my job-security is quite high, because schools don't produce infrastructure people any more... Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer.
- tasogare 5y ago
  > Just happy-go-lucky developers who know how to run things on top of a credit card, on someone else's computer. Love that punchline, it summed it all.