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Discord Serves 15M Users on One Server

58 points by afhammad 3y ago

giancarlostoro 3y ago
These type of articles are always fun, though I mistakenly thought they meant Discord was running on a single hardware server, that would be fun to read. Though considering they run on BEAM they can spread out the workload plenty. Still, I remember when the hard limit for a Discord used to be 1 million, and then along came MidJourney. It's funny how in hindsight simple changes to major web applications have a major impact. I remember, Tumblr used to show you every statistic about your blog on the dashboard, that meant every single time someone hit the front-page they had to query the latest data to show you your follower count. Sometime after they removed it from the Dashboard, I noticed Tumblr went offline / down significantly less, I doubt that was the only optimization they did, but I presume they did loads of optimizations to their platform at the time.
- mannyv 3y ago
  Yeah, statistical things like that need to be pre-calculated and cached for best performance. When you first get stuff working doing a query is easier and faster. At some point you remove it and move to counters that are updated via your data pipe.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nbittich 3y ago
After I opened the link, there was a big chunk of text about AI, then a popup asking me to subscribe appeared, and I closed the tab.
kevincox 3y ago
It is important to node here that by "Server" they mean the Discord logical server concept which may more generically be called a "community", "group" or "workspace". It has nothing to do with the physical compute architecture. So a title that would make sense to people not familiar with Discord terminology could be: > How Discord Serves 15M Members of a Single Workspace
- KTibow 3y ago
  Guild is the internal name and is used on other platforms. "workspace" sounds a bit comically serious to me in the context of Discord.
- Ajay-p 3y ago
  I thought for a moment that was one mighty machine.
WayToDoor 3y ago
The original source, the discord article [0], gives the same information, but with imo better explanations and no AI stuff at the top [0] https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-with-a-million-plus-online-users-in-a-single-server https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...

58 points by afhammad 3y ago

These type of articles are always fun, though I mistakenly thought they meant Discord was running on a single hardware server, that would be fun to read. Though considering they run on BEAM they can spread out the workload plenty. Still, I remember when the hard limit for a Discord used to be 1 million, and then along came MidJourney. It's funny how in hindsight simple changes to major web applications have a major impact. I remember, Tumblr used to show you every statistic about your blog on the dashboard, that meant every single time someone hit the front-page they had to query the latest data to show you your follower count. Sometime after they removed it from the Dashboard, I noticed Tumblr went offline / down significantly less, I doubt that was the only optimization they did, but I presume they did loads of optimizations to their platform at the time.

mannyv 3y ago
Yeah, statistical things like that need to be pre-calculated and cached for best performance. When you first get stuff working doing a query is easier and faster. At some point you remove it and move to counters that are updated via your data pipe.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nbittich 3y ago

After I opened the link, there was a big chunk of text about AI, then a popup asking me to subscribe appeared, and I closed the tab.

kevincox 3y ago

It is important to node here that by "Server" they mean the Discord logical server concept which may more generically be called a "community", "group" or "workspace". It has nothing to do with the physical compute architecture. So a title that would make sense to people not familiar with Discord terminology could be: > How Discord Serves 15M Members of a Single Workspace

KTibow 3y ago
Guild is the internal name and is used on other platforms. "workspace" sounds a bit comically serious to me in the context of Discord.
Ajay-p 3y ago
I thought for a moment that was one mighty machine.

WayToDoor 3y ago

The original source, the discord article [0], gives the same information, but with imo better explanations and no AI stuff at the top [0] https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-with-a-million-plus-online-users-in-a-single-server https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...