George Herbert wrote:
You do realize that Google has spent the better part
of a half billion
dollars on engineering a completely ground-up distributed system software
architecture, working with a problem that (unusually among largescale
enterprise data management) can theoretically be efficiently partitioned?
I mentioned Google because they're a well-known example, but it
certainly isn't the case that one needs to invest an inordinate sum to
be able to reap benefits from scaling out instead of up. Many other
sites with nowhere the engineering talent or financial budget of Google
are doing the same thing. In fact, sites with small budgets that choose
to scale up and succeed are few and far between, to my knowledge.
If you prefer a non-Google example of out over up, look at LiveJournal,
as the evolution of their software and hardware is well-documented and
more transparent than the operation of most comparable sites.
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
My point was merely that he suggested more powerful
hardware, and
received as a reply, "no, the problem is that we need more powerful
hardware".
I really wasn't trying to get involved in a polemic about engineering
practices. Jeff seems to believe that buying one powerful appliance is
clearly a better approach than buying six commodity servers, and my
point was that -- for the Wikipedia use case -- that's at best very
unclear, and at worst very wrong.
--
Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D