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Comment by hythloday | Hacker News Reader

If Plurk has 5 developers serving 1 million daily users, and Twitter has 1000 developers serving 100 million daily active users, you only have to believe that scaling by 2 orders of magnitude is twice as hard for it to be a tie in terms of developer:user ratio.

(I suspect the write load is rather different - the figures I can find for Plurk suggest 8 billion messages in total - Twitter writes half a billion a day.)

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I don't think there's a huge differences serving 1 million daily users or serving 100 million. In both cases you need highly scaleable systems. In 100 million case you need a lot more computers, but I think the overall structure of the systems could be very similar (e.g. sharded databases, auto fail-overs, extensive monitoring etc.) Of course you need a larger team serving 100million users, but I don't think you need to scale the team as much as Twitter has done.

The big advantage of software though is that you don't have to maintain a fixed ratio of developer:user like that, though. Sure, your employee count should increase as user count does, but far less than linearly.

He suggests that it might scale logarithmically, not linearly.

I'm not sure this is in practice true. Twitter have to start writing or tuning their own scale-specific software, need more analytics, application security, developer productivity, partner and sales engineering etc. proportionally than they would do at 1% of their size. Certainly they could run 100 Plurks with many fewer than 1000 engineers but I'm not sure that's the best way to characterize Twitter.

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