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Comment by dagheti | Hacker News Reader

Your criticism of this article is off the mark (though it may apply to other articles). The entire point of this article is that he is trying to replicate the exact same problem that Digg was reporting using a different RDBMS and discussing what that means.

Maybe his numbers are off and his technique is wrong, but this article isn't making a one-sized-fits-all mistake.

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Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish.

It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"?

These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.

MySQL is a good product, but it does have some significant failings when it comes to getting top-notch performance out of indexes.

Digg's description of their entire setup seems a bit unusual -- from how they've defined their tables to their query methods. It seems at least somewhat likely that they were not making optimal use of their technology.

I'd be curious what the traffic/content difference between Digg and Stackoverflow is. Stackoverflow uses an architecture very similar to what Forbes proposes here and they have plenty of capacity on rather unremarkable hardware.

I would bet that SO has several orders of magnitude less traffic than Digg.

Looking at Alexa's numbers for a rough comparison of pageviews it looks like Digg gets about 10x as many as SO:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com#trafficstats

So while SO runs on a minimal amount of closet-room hardware efficiently and without incident, Digg has heroics and clusters and scale-outs and all sorts of drama to handle just 10x the load? I'm not sure what angle you were coming from, but that makes Digg look like clowns.

Not saying that Digg aren't clowns but the traffic balance makes a huge difference. It's not implausible that Digg has an enormously bigger fraction of writes to reads than SO does which changes the scaling dynamics considerably.

Edit: To expand I'd imagine SO serves a lot of static "how do I" google hits for logged-out users which is about as easy to serve as it gets. Digg puts a higher emphasis on the logged in experience and commenting which reduces the ability to cache.

MySQL is at the bottom of the pile of what qualifies as "RDBMS" so the bottom-feeder comment might be trollish but it's not flat out wrong.

Why thinking that other people are stupid is such prevalent? It leads to so many misunderstandings.

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