12 ms·

I'm still a bit unclear on what the target market for Meteor is. Is this just for small to medium sized projects, or is it intended to be used for large-scale p

by state 12y ago

I'm still a bit unclear on what the target market for Meteor is. Is this just for small to medium sized projects, or is it intended to be used for large-scale projects as well? Since it seems like everyone wants to think of themselves as doing something huge, I'm sure the answer can't be 'no' to the second question — but I don't see any examples of significant projects being built on the platform. Actually, with that in mind, what happened to the gallery of projects built on top of Meteor? Perhaps I'm missing it. All that being said, congratulations on reaching 1.0. There's clearly a lot of great energy and thought that went in to the project. edit: The videos on the site weren't obvious to me at first, but after finding them I think this one is a good counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhtQzAX_6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhtQzAX_6k

imslavko 12y ago
If you look at the main website there are 6 featured videos of real companies using Meteor in production.
- state 12y ago
  It was completely unclear to me that those were links. I guess that's my feedback? Thanks though!
  - djmashko2 12y ago
    (I work at Meteor) We'll fix this soon! Thanks for the feedback.
Everhusk 12y ago
It's definitely a win for hackathons and getting a MVP out there that needs real time features. I can't speak much for large scale projects since I haven't had the fortune of reaching that scale yet with meteor, but I'd imagine it will be ideal for that eventually simply by extrapolating the current growth and improvement trends of the framework.
- state 12y ago
  What would concern me is if you ever reach a scale where you need to optimize in ways that Meteor can't support. But, that probably falls into the 'problems you want to have' bucket.
- swartkrans 12y ago
  At last months devshop in SF a speaker discussed straining the system and reaching the limits of Meteor with just hundreds of simultaneous connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJbGNpmE7f0&t=8m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJbGNpmE7f0&t=8m30s Hundreds isn't really exactly "webscale", but I'm sure they'll iron it out, or it could have just been the application that was at fault. It's one data point however on how meteor scales.
  - imslavko 12y ago
    [I work at Meteor and contributed to the MongoDB realtime driver] Scaling low-latency data synchronization is a challenge for scalability for sure! We are gradually building better and better drivers with persistence to MongoDB. The scalability can vary greatly depending on your application's data schema, usage patterns and amount of writes. If you watch the mentioned talk carefully, the speaker describes a collaboration tool with log replay with a lot of actions and running from a single box.
    - thathonkey 12y ago
      The "running from a single box" at the end seems like it could be the most important part of the equation. Would you agree? Or rather, would that be the recommended place to start optimizing if your app runs into scaling problems?
      - swartkrans 12y ago
        I don't know how you could load balance meteor easily, but you could put your mongodb instance anywhere and pass in its location to meteor. This doubles your risk for downtime because of hardware failure though, your uptime is no longer as good as a system that depends on the uptime of a single machine.
sferoze 12y ago
Meteor just hit 1.0 and is not the type of framework you can just start including in your stack. You really have to build a meteor app from the ground up, so it is hard for established tech companies to get into Meteor when they already have spent years coding on another stack. As new startups who use Meteor grow you will see those large-scale projects come about.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  So, to put it glibly, the only people who will use Meteor for large-scale projects are those who have no choice?
  - dasmithii 12y ago
    No, not at all. It's the other way around, really. Those who don't use Meteor for their projects may not be able to without trashing existing codebases.
    - gooseus 12y ago
      What I'm hearing is that Meteor doesn't play well with others and that you should make the decision to go with Meteor carefully since changing your mind later will require a ground-up refactor. This is pretty much my experience as someone who started working on a project where the lead dev had decided to use Meteor and then quit leaving a wonky prototype with "reactive data", poor performance and missing functionality. Now, some would say "it's not Meteors fault the UI wasn't made well!" and then I'd reply "sure, but if Meteor didn't encourage (and it seems, require) tight coupling of the data access and presentation layers, then maybe we wouldn't have spent the last 3 weeks rebuilding the entire app from the ground up just to add some missing functionality and fix UI bugs". Honestly, I really can't figure out the lack criticism I see of Meteor around here. All these comments to congratulate on an arbitrary step in version number? I see other articles of accomplishment with a fraction of the positive encouragement and many times the criticisms. Is there a silent majority, or did I spend the last few months being underwhelmed by Meteor because I'm missing something? Meteor embodies, for me, a tool that makes things 'easy', rather than one that makes things 'simple'. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy Anyways, that's just one developers experience and opinion, take if for whatever you feel it's worth.
theckel 12y ago
We've built a huge meteor app that has scaled to 1000s of concurrent users and still growing -- there have been some sticky points along the way, but overall, we're extremely pleased. Meteor is an amazing engineering feat.
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  Do you have any posts on how you scaled Meteor?
  - joshowens 12y ago
    I wrote something on scaling meteor: http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/.
    - joeyspn 12y ago
      Cool, but could you throw in some RAM and CPU usage stats?
  - theckel 12y ago
    We will be sharing more soon. We've been developing with Meteor since the winter of 2012 and two main scaling issues have crept up: (1) the web tier was a bottleneck prior to 0.7.0's implementation of oplog tailing; and (2) post oplog tailing, mongo actually became our bottleneck with the write locks. We were able to get to about 3300 concurrent users (in our very data-intensive application) against a single beefy mongo primary before the database started choking, and at that point, we could set our readPreference to the secondary in order to further scale horizontally.
    - polarix 12y ago
      Okay, I'll bite: who is "We"?
      - theckel 12y ago
taude 12y ago
I'm wondering if it's true usefullness is potentially in an Enterprise supplemental tool to cobble together some quick apps, maybe like what MS Access was used for a long time ago, except this time you get nice browser-based, reactive applications. I'm not sure you'd use it to build the infrastructure of your startup on. Or a content heavy site. But I see building tools like for managing a lot of developer instances, internal tools for config, etc to possibly be pretty sweet for this.

by state 12y ago

imslavko 12y ago

If you look at the main website there are 6 featured videos of real companies using Meteor in production.

state 12y ago
It was completely unclear to me that those were links. I guess that's my feedback? Thanks though!
- djmashko2 12y ago
  (I work at Meteor) We'll fix this soon! Thanks for the feedback.

Everhusk 12y ago

It's definitely a win for hackathons and getting a MVP out there that needs real time features. I can't speak much for large scale projects since I haven't had the fortune of reaching that scale yet with meteor, but I'd imagine it will be ideal for that eventually simply by extrapolating the current growth and improvement trends of the framework.

state 12y ago
What would concern me is if you ever reach a scale where you need to optimize in ways that Meteor can't support. But, that probably falls into the 'problems you want to have' bucket.
swartkrans 12y ago
At last months devshop in SF a speaker discussed straining the system and reaching the limits of Meteor with just hundreds of simultaneous connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJbGNpmE7f0&t=8m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJbGNpmE7f0&t=8m30s Hundreds isn't really exactly "webscale", but I'm sure they'll iron it out, or it could have just been the application that was at fault. It's one data point however on how meteor scales.
- imslavko 12y ago
  [I work at Meteor and contributed to the MongoDB realtime driver] Scaling low-latency data synchronization is a challenge for scalability for sure! We are gradually building better and better drivers with persistence to MongoDB. The scalability can vary greatly depending on your application's data schema, usage patterns and amount of writes. If you watch the mentioned talk carefully, the speaker describes a collaboration tool with log replay with a lot of actions and running from a single box.
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    The "running from a single box" at the end seems like it could be the most important part of the equation. Would you agree? Or rather, would that be the recommended place to start optimizing if your app runs into scaling problems?
    - swartkrans 12y ago
      I don't know how you could load balance meteor easily, but you could put your mongodb instance anywhere and pass in its location to meteor. This doubles your risk for downtime because of hardware failure though, your uptime is no longer as good as a system that depends on the uptime of a single machine.

sferoze 12y ago

Meteor just hit 1.0 and is not the type of framework you can just start including in your stack. You really have to build a meteor app from the ground up, so it is hard for established tech companies to get into Meteor when they already have spent years coding on another stack. As new startups who use Meteor grow you will see those large-scale projects come about.

lclarkmichalek 12y ago
So, to put it glibly, the only people who will use Meteor for large-scale projects are those who have no choice?
- dasmithii 12y ago
  No, not at all. It's the other way around, really. Those who don't use Meteor for their projects may not be able to without trashing existing codebases.
  - gooseus 12y ago
    What I'm hearing is that Meteor doesn't play well with others and that you should make the decision to go with Meteor carefully since changing your mind later will require a ground-up refactor. This is pretty much my experience as someone who started working on a project where the lead dev had decided to use Meteor and then quit leaving a wonky prototype with "reactive data", poor performance and missing functionality. Now, some would say "it's not Meteors fault the UI wasn't made well!" and then I'd reply "sure, but if Meteor didn't encourage (and it seems, require) tight coupling of the data access and presentation layers, then maybe we wouldn't have spent the last 3 weeks rebuilding the entire app from the ground up just to add some missing functionality and fix UI bugs". Honestly, I really can't figure out the lack criticism I see of Meteor around here. All these comments to congratulate on an arbitrary step in version number? I see other articles of accomplishment with a fraction of the positive encouragement and many times the criticisms. Is there a silent majority, or did I spend the last few months being underwhelmed by Meteor because I'm missing something? Meteor embodies, for me, a tool that makes things 'easy', rather than one that makes things 'simple'. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy Anyways, that's just one developers experience and opinion, take if for whatever you feel it's worth.

theckel 12y ago

We've built a huge meteor app that has scaled to 1000s of concurrent users and still growing -- there have been some sticky points along the way, but overall, we're extremely pleased. Meteor is an amazing engineering feat.

bsilvereagle 12y ago
Do you have any posts on how you scaled Meteor?
- joshowens 12y ago
  I wrote something on scaling meteor: http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/.
  - joeyspn 12y ago
    Cool, but could you throw in some RAM and CPU usage stats?
- theckel 12y ago
  We will be sharing more soon. We've been developing with Meteor since the winter of 2012 and two main scaling issues have crept up: (1) the web tier was a bottleneck prior to 0.7.0's implementation of oplog tailing; and (2) post oplog tailing, mongo actually became our bottleneck with the write locks. We were able to get to about 3300 concurrent users (in our very data-intensive application) against a single beefy mongo primary before the database started choking, and at that point, we could set our readPreference to the secondary in order to further scale horizontally.
  - polarix 12y ago
    Okay, I'll bite: who is "We"?
    - theckel 12y ago

taude 12y ago

I'm wondering if it's true usefullness is potentially in an Enterprise supplemental tool to cobble together some quick apps, maybe like what MS Access was used for a long time ago, except this time you get nice browser-based, reactive applications. I'm not sure you'd use it to build the infrastructure of your startup on. Or a content heavy site. But I see building tools like for managing a lot of developer instances, internal tools for config, etc to possibly be pretty sweet for this.