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Being a PHP + VMWare system (culture-wise, not the technology itself), I was not surprised about all the madness on DB level. They didn't use indices in Postgres but they added Redis. Its incredible how many, perhaps most, systems do crazy things like that.

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No. Most systems do not do crazy things like that. That system by itself could run Google search for lots of queries/s, and it is having trouble to deliver few operations per day. Come on, that server is faster than anything running in late nineties for world-wide massive access (!)

Of course, the flip side is too many indexes.

I have seen both extreme: no index v/s all column indexed, no cache at all v/s cache at every level.

I have seen caches having more inserts v/s reads.

I have seen them replacing MySQL by NoSQL as it does not scale for them.

This is common for early stage funded startups founded by non tech founders.

Oh I can imagine the pain...

"Let's make our change password system handle 100k requests per minute but the front page starts to get wonky at 1000 req/min"

This sounds familiar. Few day ago i over overheard this, "Our user authentication system is on MySQL, it may not scale, let's move it to NoSQL."

Only time this table is touched to check user entered correct password or not.

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