9 ms·
Actually the trade off is not between consistency and performance, but scalability and performance (CAP theorem). Although related, they are not the same concep
by pestaa 13y ago
Actually the trade off is not between consistency and performance, but scalability and performance (CAP theorem). Although related, they are not the same concepts.
My opinion is that you can have both performance and consistency, and work your way toward scalability as required. I recall that Facebook has a very high server-per-engineer ratio (though I acknowledge that the user-per-engineer ratio is even higher in comparison to other startups).
I also realize it is not cost-efficient to write bugfree software, but saying they did it the other way on purpose is forgiving them too much. You never write bad software intentionally.
They didn't care, and the world should have relied and should continue to rely on better software.
- jafaku 13y agoI know the CAP theorem, but that's not what is going on here. And now again you are saying that the data loss is a bug. It's not! Like I said, it's by design, they are probably using a fire-and-forget methodology for writing the comments. Do you seriously think there is a bug in PHP or their PHP code that is making a very little percentage of comments get lost? Besides, they have moved away from PHP long time ago for their backend. They are using a combination of Java, Scala, etc. Software that loses some data instead of crashing when under heavy load is not bad software. It has its uses, eg: massive amount (per unit of time) of unimportant messages that no one is willing to pay for.