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Comment by frje1400 | Hacker News Reader

> If your writes are fast, doing them serially does not cause anyone to wait.

Why impose such a limitation on your system when you don't have to by using some other database actually designed for multi user systems (Postgres, MySQL, etc)?

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Because development and maintenance faster and easier to reason about. Increasing the chances you really get to 86 million daily active users.

So in this solution, you run the backend on a single node that reads/writes from an SQLite file, and that is the entire system?

Thats basically how the web started. You can serve a ridiculous number of users from a single physical machine. It isn't until you get into the hundreds-of-millions of users ballpark where you need to actually create architecture. The "cloud" lets you rent a small part of a physical machine, so it actually feels like you need more machines than you do. But a modern server? Easily 16-32+ cores, 128+gb of ram, and hundreds of tb of space. All for less than 2k per month (amortized). Yeah, you need an actual (small) team of people to manage that; but that will get you so far that it is utterly ridiculous.

Assuming you can accept 99% uptime (that's ~3 days a year being down), and if you were on a single cloud in 2025; that's basically last year.

I agree...there is scale and then there is scale. And then there is scale like Facebook.

We need not assume internet FB level scale for typical biz apps where one instance may support a few hundred users max. Or even few thousand. Over engineering under such assumptions is likely cost ineffective and may even increase surface area of risk. $0.02

It goes much further than that.. a single moderately sized VPS web server can handle millions of hard-to-cache requests per day, all hitting the db.

Most will want to use a managed db, but for a real basic setup you can just run postgres or mysql on the same box. And running your own db on a separate VPS is not hard either.

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