And I must add that I also point that given a good technical solution for a business case A, it may not map correctly to another business case. It is always a

And I must add that I also point that given a good technical solution for a business case A, it may not map correctly to another business case. It is always a question of context. So I do think the question is lacking of business context. The question asked is a if there is a silver bullet. The problem is optimization are always context related. You can even improve a software's sclalabity by changing your processes (who needs concurrencial access to a database if your process can ensure one and only one person is enough to do a certain provisioning that is Single Point of Performance loss?). I mean, my life as a dev would be easier if managers where not asking for cost reductions and forcing technical solutions that increase costs and then convocating us because the company is having unexpected loss, and thus our wages have to be cut (or more often we have to do up to 50% extra hours coding for free) (and their wages are not). So yes, I am bitter, and unnice. And even if you would be posting the "right question" here; then we would conclude that you are asking for a free audit, and also probably leaking business secrets (yep, btw, if you are on a competitive market, the concurrence and your customers now know you have a problem with scaling, and how you take costly decisions without caring about your costs... nice). So with a brilliant reasoning ab absurdum, I can thus demonstrate that neither questions (the mongo oriented or the business oriented) are good questions to ask on HN. It should be an heuristic on HN, and there maybe should a howto ask the right question like this one http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Remember you are basically asking skilled people to do part of your job for free while aiming for a lot of money (I still wish you to be successful). It is quite logically itching poorly paid (or delusive (my case)) skilled coders. And you are also leaking insider's information about your technology AND (lack of) business processes. And you may have future (and ex) cyberterrorists(joke)/concurrent/customers/partners/investors/employees here. And you probably think security is about your 128 character gibberish SSO password OAUTH2 compliant chain you are using. Well most successful attacks are using social engineering, so now I know that I can hack you by proposing you a free software with a trojan aiming at solving your problem (using native active record so that it is not a first order backdoor). Or phone you as a contractor, and being paid to have a look at your documents because I know you are technologically a sitting duck. I mean: seriously? Advice #2: DON'T FEED THE TROLL (TL;DR) Yep, if you don't read until the end, you will not notice that I am serious, but choose deliberately a provocative tone because, I have fun, time, and I see this as the price to pay for my free consulting. I take the freedom to express my views in the formalism I choose. My intention is to see what will be the arbitration made by HN (and readers) between business (what I am saying is valid) and formalism (I say it in a clearly non consensual). So I intend to push my reasoning to the extreme just for measuring what is more important: business or being nice?