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Comment by emilepetrone | Hacker News Reader

A technical response would be valuable to the community. Too often we accept poor performance without questioning what is going on - and learning from it.

It's a valid question. Please don't be so cynical. Thanks

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I'm not being cynical. I find the odds of anyone here having intimate knowledge of tumblr's setup to be really low. Aside from someone with that knowledge, you aren't going to get anything other than speculation and gossip. If you had asked, what are issues that could cause the types of problems that a size w/ tumblr's scope might encounter, that I could understand.

I see quite often people talk about 'good practices' in web-programming but generally say "don't worry about scale issues... if it becomes an issue, you've just beaten 90% of other startups" umm, isn't this a bad practice? Because when you do start worrying, it's gonna be a bitch to fix...

Why would this be a bad practice? This is a GOOD practice. You don't want to add months to the development time before you know if it's going to get traction.

I've had several successful sites, but dozens more failures and I'm glad I didn't waste the time making them all easily scalable; they simply didn't need it.

I'm just wondering what happens when suddenly you're growing incredibly fast, and you simply do not have the development/money to keep up with the volume of traffic, how does one get on top?

that is a better problem to have then shipping too late to matter.

Fair point.

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