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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

I think I've heard a saying about this, something about premature optimisation...

Sure you shouldn't care about scaling at the beginning. But why should you start using a system that you already know won't scale in the future?

> Sure you shouldn't care about scaling at the beginning. But why should you start using a system that you already know won't scale in the future?

Because it's well supported and solid otherwise? There's a wealth of documentation, resources of many kinds, software built around it (debugging, tracing, UIs, etc.). Because there's a solid community available that can help you with your problems?

What alternative technology is there that scales better? I guess MySQL could be it, but doesn't MySQL also come with a ton of its own footguns?

I use Postgres at the moment and I'm happy except for the process per connection part and the upgrade part. Knowing what I know now I think MySQL would have made me happier. On the other hand, it may have caused other issues I don't have with Postgres. I just hope the Postgres team maintains its roadmap based on posts like this.

But you have to get to that future first! If you lose your customers because you can't deliver something on time due to complexity of your 'scaling-proof' system or because you can't accommodate changes requested by clients because they would compromise your architecture, scaling will be last of your worries.

Only if I _know_ I'm creating something that will definitely have huge amounts of concurrent users and someone pays me to make it scale from the start.

For a hobby project that might take off or might not, there's really no point in making everything "webscale"[0] just in case.

[0] https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

Because the hyperscalable databases are much more difficult to set up, use and administer. It's not a "free" upgrade, it'll slow down everything else you do.

There are a lot of dimensions to scaling. It's hard to predict where you really will have to scale up.

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