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One server to serve an RSS reader to the 5k users, 23 others to host 23 different stats and monitoring applications to make sure that one server is working OK?

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I can't speak for him, but the RSS reader I am working on at the moment is similarly split into multiple parts:

* Crawler - retrieves RSS feeds and parses articles

* Database server

* Analyser - performs semantic analysis and various other statistical processing on posts

* Propagator - pushes new posts to everyone's feed

* Cacher - serves a cached copy of the user's feed

* Web server

Based on loads I would just add more nodes depending on what was needed.

Pretty close :)

One server (machine), 23 servers (waiters) to cater to that one servers' (machine) every needs?

Closer to 50/50. 50% of the servers do actual tedious work. 50% cater to users' needs.

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