> Is it worth scaling app servers or is it better to use Postgres well and scale a managed PG offering? That is a very good question indeed, it probably depend

> Is it worth scaling app servers or is it better to use Postgres well and scale a managed PG offering? That is a very good question indeed, it probably depends on whatever compute or the DB offering is cheaper to scale for you; from my very anecdotal experience using both, usually DB is much more expensive to scale up. > What do you mean by “expand”? Getting more data thru the pipes, getting closer to the limit of the network pipes. That doesn't sound like a realistic scenario to me - pulling Y articles from X authors. If you're not pulling directly from articles, and you're pulling from X authors, X>1, you most likely don't actually want the articles, more likely you want instead some stat of each article like article score, subject, tags or comment counts. Then I don't see neither the JOIN expansion or the JSON ser/de being a serious issue at all compared to the DB retrieval costs.