3 ms·

This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hard

This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hardware box doing it on ingress!

throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
I used to administrate a small fleet of sun sparc hosts with SSL accelerators. They were so much money $$$$. I proposed dumping them all for a smaller set of x86 hosts running linux, it took 2-3 years before the old admins believed in the performance and cost savings. They refused to believe it would even work.
- rastignack 2y ago
  I have the same memories, trying to convince people to dump slow as hell sparc processors for database workloads in favor of X86 machines costing a 10th of the price. To this day I still argue with ex Solaris sysadmins.
- JeremyNT 2y ago
  I lived through that era too, it was wild to see how quickly x86 dethroned sparc (even Intel's big misses like Itanium were only minor bumps in the road). Those days, you had to carefully architect your infrastructure and design your workload to deal with it, and every hardware improvement required you to reevaluate what you were doing. Hence novel architectural choices. Everything is way easier for normal sized organizations now, and that level of optimization is just no longer required outside of companies doing huge scale.
bjourne 2y ago
15 years ago I ran a website (Django+Postgres+memcached) serving 50k unique daily visitors on a dirt cheap vps. Even back then the scalability issues were overstated.
- namaria 2y ago
  As the stock market prices now expected future growth, architecture had to justify rising stock prices by promising future scalability. It was never about the actual workloads, much more about growth projections. And a whole lot of cargo cult behavior.

3 ms·

This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hard

by alfiedotwtf 2y ago

This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hardware box doing it on ingress!

throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
I used to administrate a small fleet of sun sparc hosts with SSL accelerators. They were so much money $$$$. I proposed dumping them all for a smaller set of x86 hosts running linux, it took 2-3 years before the old admins believed in the performance and cost savings. They refused to believe it would even work.
- rastignack 2y ago
  I have the same memories, trying to convince people to dump slow as hell sparc processors for database workloads in favor of X86 machines costing a 10th of the price. To this day I still argue with ex Solaris sysadmins.
- JeremyNT 2y ago
  I lived through that era too, it was wild to see how quickly x86 dethroned sparc (even Intel's big misses like Itanium were only minor bumps in the road). Those days, you had to carefully architect your infrastructure and design your workload to deal with it, and every hardware improvement required you to reevaluate what you were doing. Hence novel architectural choices. Everything is way easier for normal sized organizations now, and that level of optimization is just no longer required outside of companies doing huge scale.
bjourne 2y ago
15 years ago I ran a website (Django+Postgres+memcached) serving 50k unique daily visitors on a dirt cheap vps. Even back then the scalability issues were overstated.
- namaria 2y ago
  As the stock market prices now expected future growth, architecture had to justify rising stock prices by promising future scalability. It was never about the actual workloads, much more about growth projections. And a whole lot of cargo cult behavior.