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> That is an architectural failure.

Let's not jump the guns too soon. Analytic products are notoriously hard from scaling perspective. UI, APIs, Infra that works crisply for 1x data, starts to become sluggish at 10x and really breaks down at 100x.

Startups solve the 100x scale problem when they get there (sensibly so). In this case, they got there way too quickly thanks to HN traffic.

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IMO, they probably failed way before 100x expected usage. It was probably before 10x expected usage. This isn’t crazy. This is a problem that happens for a lot of teams dealing with scale. You engineer for 1x (checking off requirements) and anything over that tears everything to shreds. The difference between developing a solution on your local and hitting your PERF environment is massive. e.g. I can’t run a TB DB on my local, so... if I don’t see queries running in less that 10ms-100ms, I basically know that the queries are never going to complete in PROD. Scale is hard.

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