Mar 18, 2008

Scaling is for nerds?

Posted by: Jon Clausen

Well that's certainly one way to look at the subject of building an app for scalability. And probably very true to a certain degree as well...

The truth is that almost all web ventures never become big enough to even need a separate database server, let alone a farm of memcached servers, file servers, and enough computing power to plan a trip to Orion. That doesn?t mean they won?t become profitable. You can be extremely profitable with relatively low traffic. So don?t worry about scaling ? scaling is for nerds. By the time you hit pain points, you can bring in someone who really knows what they?re doing. Most importantly, by the time you hit pain points, you should be profitable enough to not worry about bringing in someone who knows what they?re doing. And no, just because your site goes down for an hour while on the home page of digg.com doesn?t mean that you need to worry about scaling.

I'm still going to take a bit of a contrarian approach in that building any system with an eye towards scalability never hurts and nearly always helps. An eye toward scalability, IMHO, forces a developer to pay attention to some of the small details in the code and architecture that might otherwise be allowed to slide.

One of the big advantages that we have as Coldfusion developers is that we program in a language that scales well and in which the server technology is designed to do the same. While it's true that none of us may ever build an app big enough to inhabit it's own server farm, it doesn't hurt to think big. Smiling Emoticon

 
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