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I've worked for a reasonable subset of top Internet sites and have friends who work at the remainder I haven't been at and I can emphatically say that none of t

• tracker1 12y ago
  I didn't say "top Internet sites" ... I said "most" sites... that being anything not in the top 10000 sites, and probably over half of those within the top 10000 could be the case. I also said, with a caching system in place. (data and/or output). It really depends on how interactive and static your needs are, which will vary... but most sites are mostly static and very cachable content... For an example, look at StackOverflow... they were really huge before they needed to start breaking their data up more... Of course their SQL servers are enormous by anyone's standards.. the point is you can scale vertically a lot, and if you can handle a certain amount of downtime, or reduced functionality (if db is down), you can go a long way on a single database server... add caching, add replication... all of this before needing to break data up. (In mostly read scenarios)