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If Plurk has 5 developers serving 1 million daily users, and Twitter has 1000 developers serving 100 million daily active users, you only have to believe that s
by hythloday 13y ago
If Plurk has 5 developers serving 1 million daily users, and Twitter has 1000 developers serving 100 million daily active users, you only have to believe that scaling by 2 orders of magnitude is twice as hard for it to be a tie in terms of developer:user ratio.
(I suspect the write load is rather different - the figures I can find for Plurk suggest 8 billion messages in total - Twitter writes half a billion a day.)
- csbrooks 13y agoThe big advantage of software though is that you don't have to maintain a fixed ratio of developer:user like that, though. Sure, your employee count should increase as user count does, but far less than linearly.
- parbo 13y agoHe suggests that it might scale logarithmically, not linearly.
- hythloday 13y agoI'm not sure this is in practice true. Twitter have to start writing or tuning their own scale-specific software, need more analytics, application security, developer productivity, partner and sales engineering etc. proportionally than they would do at 1% of their size. Certainly they could run 100 Plurks with many fewer than 1000 engineers but I'm not sure that's the best way to characterize Twitter.
- amix 13y agoI don't think there's a huge differences serving 1 million daily users or serving 100 million. In both cases you need highly scaleable systems. In 100 million case you need a lot more computers, but I think the overall structure of the systems could be very similar (e.g. sharded databases, auto fail-overs, extensive monitoring etc.) Of course you need a larger team serving 100million users, but I don't think you need to scale the team as much as Twitter has done.