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Curious about the 14 servers mentioned on your careers page -- why so much hardware to support only 325 active users?

• ttruett 15y ago
  We have built out infrastructure to support about 50,000 users. Premature? Sure, but fairly reasonable for the price. Most of the server capacity consists of our Cassandra cluster which we are using to personalize user content...
  • kainosnoema 15y ago
    Is there a particular reason why you decided to purchase 14 physical servers instead of spinning up virtual instances (or even co-located servers) for easy scaling? As you've discovered, it's hard to estimate what kind of load you'll need to handle, and the up-front cost is impossible to recover. Also, I'd recommend spending some time looking at your architecture, as you should be able to handle 50,000 active users with a lot less metal. The extra infrastructure can often be more expensive than a well-designed architecture.