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37signals don't use sharding. They use one database server with enough RAM to load the db into memory

One database server for the whole of basecamp?

Edit: I found this:

> With that in mind, we went looking for an option to host the Basecamp database, which is becoming a monster. As of this writing, the database is 325GB and handles several thousand queries per second at peak times.

325GB RAM?! But now they have multiple servers. Read more: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2479-nuts-bolts-database-serv...

HP sells servers with up to 64 cores and 2 TB of memory. Considering the car that DHH just bought himself, they should be able to buy/lease several of them.

Are these x86 servers? Or do you mean a single chip with 64 cores?

This thing: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/15351-15351-33...

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/enterprise/x3850x5/...

You can get servers that can house 512GB or 1TB of RAM from HP/Sun/Dell. Scaling out your app servers and scaling up your DB is common in systems that don't need to be truly "web scale".

They do that for everything but Basecamp[1]. I wonder what they use for Basecamp.

[1] Second paragraph: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2479-nuts-bolts-database-serv...

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