5 ms·

Am I the only one to think this is bit too much for 11m users? 88DB insurances, ~300 across cache and nosql DB, ~200 web servers?

pjmlp 3y ago
No, I feel the same. Serving ecommerce sites with a couple of Java or .NET servers, backed by Oracle or SQL Server instances, surviving heavy load days like black Friday. See Stackoverflow architecture, for example.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  StackOverflow gets away with their arch because they have a much bigger read load than write load, and a design that can “hide” slow writes. I would hazard a guess the Pinterest usage model has a somewhat higher write-load, and is more sensitive to slow writes/non-propagating writes. Do I think their arch is still overkill? Yeah, do I think equating them with SO and friends is reasonable? No.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Still, the amount of servers is most likely a side effect of using Python as well. The scaling issues we had with Tcl in the dot-com wave with our AOLServer clone, is one of the reasons why I wouldn't use something like Python.
    - FridgeSeal 3y ago
      Definitely. There was a post on HN a couple of months back about Pinterest saving 2m/month on infra costs by swapping from Python to Elixir/Erlang. It copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving, how dumb, Python is good enough”.
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - re-thc 3y ago
        > t copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving When is anything worth doing then? Do people really think there's magic everywhere?
maccard 3y ago
I do agree but that said, they actually built and ran this, and it worked. The world is filled with technically superior products that died.
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
Python is slow and Django is a beast. It's very expensive to scale to non-trivial usage. Great for productivity though. But you'll pay for that in your cloud bill.
- yuppiepuppie 3y ago
  Depends what your org is optimizing for. Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development? It’s a question I have to deal with on a daily basis when I here of yet again another “fast” tech to add to our stack.
  - throwat2341 3y ago
    > Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development? Historically I would agree. There are options now that are both easy to develop in and are blazingly fast (C#, Go, Rust, Kotlin to name a few). The elephant in the room is that both Ruby and Python fell behind in relative ease of use and computational performance with respect to other ecosystems and instead of addressing pressing matters there is a lot of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance at play such as presenting false dichotomies.
    - whstl 3y ago
      100% agree. I never experienced this mythical speed of development of Django or Rails, and I've been using both on/off for the last 15 years. Back then I was using stuff that was quite fast for development already. But as soon as you have something moderately sized the slowness of languages like Python or Ruby becomes a problem for running tests, migrations, debugging, increased server costs, downtime, overhead in things like queues. I worked in some quite large projects though, so maybe for small stuff they work, but I absolutely hate them for writing big apps. Like you said, the speed of development is IME fantastic with languages like Golang, C# or Node.js, and they don't suffer from the performance issues. Lots of companies local to me moving to Kotlin as well and my friends have only good things to say.
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pjmlp 3y ago

No, I feel the same. Serving ecommerce sites with a couple of Java or .NET servers, backed by Oracle or SQL Server instances, surviving heavy load days like black Friday. See Stackoverflow architecture, for example.

FridgeSeal 3y ago
StackOverflow gets away with their arch because they have a much bigger read load than write load, and a design that can “hide” slow writes. I would hazard a guess the Pinterest usage model has a somewhat higher write-load, and is more sensitive to slow writes/non-propagating writes. Do I think their arch is still overkill? Yeah, do I think equating them with SO and friends is reasonable? No.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Still, the amount of servers is most likely a side effect of using Python as well. The scaling issues we had with Tcl in the dot-com wave with our AOLServer clone, is one of the reasons why I wouldn't use something like Python.
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    Definitely. There was a post on HN a couple of months back about Pinterest saving 2m/month on infra costs by swapping from Python to Elixir/Erlang. It copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving, how dumb, Python is good enough”.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > t copped flack in the comments because basically “ppphhh $2m that’s not even worth saving When is anything worth doing then? Do people really think there's magic everywhere?

maccard 3y ago

I do agree but that said, they actually built and ran this, and it worked. The world is filled with technically superior products that died.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

Python is slow and Django is a beast. It's very expensive to scale to non-trivial usage. Great for productivity though. But you'll pay for that in your cloud bill.

yuppiepuppie 3y ago
Depends what your org is optimizing for. Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development? It’s a question I have to deal with on a daily basis when I here of yet again another “fast” tech to add to our stack.
- throwat2341 3y ago
  > Are they optimizing for cost or speed of development? Historically I would agree. There are options now that are both easy to develop in and are blazingly fast (C#, Go, Rust, Kotlin to name a few). The elephant in the room is that both Ruby and Python fell behind in relative ease of use and computational performance with respect to other ecosystems and instead of addressing pressing matters there is a lot of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance at play such as presenting false dichotomies.
  - whstl 3y ago
    100% agree. I never experienced this mythical speed of development of Django or Rails, and I've been using both on/off for the last 15 years. Back then I was using stuff that was quite fast for development already. But as soon as you have something moderately sized the slowness of languages like Python or Ruby becomes a problem for running tests, migrations, debugging, increased server costs, downtime, overhead in things like queues. I worked in some quite large projects though, so maybe for small stuff they work, but I absolutely hate them for writing big apps. Like you said, the speed of development is IME fantastic with languages like Golang, C# or Node.js, and they don't suffer from the performance issues. Lots of companies local to me moving to Kotlin as well and my friends have only good things to say.
- deleted 3y ago
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