Ask HN: Why can't Tumblr stay up?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069683

by emilepetrone • 16 years ago

5 9 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are you hoping for a response from a tumblr engineer or just some idle speculation and gossip?

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

veb3• 16 years ago

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...

spooneybarger3• 16 years ago

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.

dieselz• 16 years ago

Anyone looking at their situation is probably saying "with all the resources they have, they should be able to build a system that could stay up." This is true. Its likely that if they could start from scratch, their team could put together a system that would be able to handle the traffic they are seeing and expect to see in the future. The problem is getting the legacy systems to the point where they can scale. It's one thing to have a platform that handles 10s of thousands requests per day. Now convert that system into one that handles 100s of millions of requests daily. Thats a tall order.

Developers which are involved with a product early are typically more interested in building a viable product, not getting it to "web-scale," and rightfully so.

Ask HN: Why can't Tumblr stay up?

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