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Comment by andyhmltn | Hacker News Reader

'Just buy bigger machines' - Uhh I mean that works but that isn't really a solution is it?

> Architecture is doing the right thing when growth can be handled by adding more of the same stuff. You want to be able to scale by throwing money at a problem which means throwing more boxes at a problem as you need them. If your architecture can do that, then you’re golden.

Source: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/15/scaling-pinterest-...

But that's not the first port of call. For instance, I've worked with a few companies that were perplexed why their site was going slow when they had invested heavily in great servers. It turns out the code was terrible.

I agree and I've seen that; however, the point of the article is that ideally you have rock-solid code and the only sane way to scale is just to add more of the same resources as the codebase is already optimized.

The reason I posted the quote was to answer your on your remark that it isn't a solution - it is close to an ideal solution actually, but not applicable everywhere and at any time (e.g. sloppy/non-optimized code as you pointed out).

Hope this makes sense.

If your product is profitable then being able to scale the server side by buy bigger/more servers (aka throwing money at the problem) can be a great approach. It means no new code write, and more importantly, no new code to test. There can be much bigger gains by updating your software but the costs are much higher and the turn around time is generally longer (for major updates).

This is not a valid approach on the client side though as you don't control the hardware.

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