6 ms·
Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by som
by crotho 4y ago
Have you any idea what it takes simply to maintain a machine such as twitter, let alone make even minor alterations? There was a recent telling interview by someone who used to work there who thought it wouldn't be long until the whole thing collapses on its own because there were huge teams dedicated to simply keeping the thing running.
- thrown_22 4y agoBack of the envelope calculation: A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop. Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.
- cristiancavalli 4y agoWhat a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web service. found the engineer who, in their own words, “couldn’t code their way out of paper bag.”
- thrown_22 4y agoIf you're serving 40mb a second you don't _need_ a distributed system. Twitter isn't Netflix.
- cristiancavalli 4y agoIt’s pretty laughable you believe your own “math.” I guess even serving an actual front end doesn’t factor into your calculations. Hey go build something and you might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code exercises and smelling your own brain farts.
- thrown_22 4y agoI guess you're right, you need 10,000 JS engineers to change a light bulb.
- greedo 4y agoIn the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page views a month, all running off three database servers and two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees? One, Markus Frind[1]. 1. http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture Of course things have changed, money will do that.
- cristiancavalli 4y agoTwitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees — that seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going by this weird metric of “amount of data served should roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio”). Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g. moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of skilled engineering work given it’s been a solved set of problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000 employees — I guess they should only need a fraction of that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?
- crotho 4y ago