Server Scaling Debate

The cluster focuses on discussions about the number of servers required to handle massive user scales, such as millions of monthly or concurrent users, with debates on single-server capabilities versus multi-server setups and real-world examples like WhatsApp.

📉 Falling 0.4x DevOps & Infrastructure
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20
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#2224
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Keywords

RAM US CPU planetscale.com HN thinkingelixir.com WhatsApp OS CPX11 github.com server concurrent servers users sockets handle scale requests serving load

Sample Comments

alisonkisk Mar 14, 2021 View on HN

Is it 1000x times harder to server 10K users?

nugator Feb 24, 2017 View on HN

Holy cow, 28 000 servers, can you give us a clue to what you need so many servers for?

system2 Nov 9, 2023 View on HN

Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server could handle that.

ascar Feb 11, 2024 View on HN

"So what scale are we talking about? A few million monthly users? So like hackernews? I would use a single server... "

jonknee Feb 13, 2012 View on HN

100 servers for billions of requests per day seems crazy optimistic. It sounds like they're running pretty lean as it is.

zaarn Jan 23, 2019 View on HN

A dedicated server of decent size should easily be able to handle this kind of traffic.

robben1234 Jun 11, 2023 View on HN

Serving a social network is not the case where you'd want just one server. Mainly due to reliability concerns, spikes in traffic and different patterns at different times.But if you like the idea of ignoring best practices, there are EC2 instances with 192 vCPUs that go for several thousands an hour. And taking as example Golang benchmarks https://github.com/smallnest/go-web-framewor

amelius Apr 30, 2015 View on HN

How many servers does this run on? How does this scale?

londons_explore Dec 19, 2019 View on HN

WhatsApp used to be hosted on ~15 bare metal servers serving 100 million concurrent users...

vocram May 8, 2023 View on HN

I understand your point, but millions sounds an exaggeration- I have a hard time believing a single node can handle millions of concurrent users