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How many applications you know that need 100 servers?

I know of only a few that need 10...



The one I work on, for a start :-) A good deal more in fact...

But it's not just servers. You are up against physical availability of stuff, and stuff gets exponentially more expensive as you approach the limit. A programmer who is wasteful of memory on a single box will eventually reach a point where you simply can't buy more, you will have to rewrite the app to run on more machines, for example. At the small scale, sure, programmer time is expensive. But on an industrial scale, programmers are pretty cheap compared to say "building and operating an entire new datacentre".


If you are in the 10+ server league, you already are in that 1% where code efficiency and performance become more important than iteration speed or ease of development. In fact, it would be interesting to map where this transition occurs ;-)

And computers are cheap, regardless of how many you have. You say a datacenter with 50K servers is expensive, but imagine how bad would it be to maintain a building with 50K programmers...




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