My first scaled project, we were aiming at 30req/s per server. On UltraSPARC boxes, so maybe 8 cores? At a time when memcached was brand spanking new and thus not trustworthy, and F5 had just got their traffic shaping logic to actually work. We did it, but the architecture was terrible and we should have been able to do 50-100 req/s/s if we had taken certain principles more seriously.

My current project is doing 5x the traffic but with 20x the cores, it’s embarrassing. And that’s just counting “our” servers, which are only about 1/3 of the whole enterprise (heading toward 50% if I wasn’t on the scene). I look at all the waste in our project and then I think about why I would ever need 50k cores, let alone servers and I just can’t fathom it. Who is handling a tens of millions of requests per second? And what on earth are you fucking up so badly that you need 2 million servers? Is Google doing 4 billion requests per second?

At some point I have to ask myself if making it easy to manage more servers was really their best strategy. Often friction and constraints are where innovation comes from. When things are easy people don’t think about them until they are gone.