“The only reason Friendster didn’t work was because the site failed. The most important thing I learned from Friendster is to have a good engineering team to scale the database and servers and the right architecture. It’s not easy. It’s really hard to scale these sites this quickly.”

TheDeal.com: Friendster finds no love (thx marco)

Paradoxically, you can’t worry too much about scaling at the beginning of a project…

Don’t scale. Don’t worry about five 9’s or even two. Worry about getting something to a point where there’s reason to worry about it.

Jason Fried on the signal vs noise blog

…as you will have to restart from scratch anyway:

“The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture.”

Dare Obasanjo

I still think you need to design for scalability at the first second of any mainstream web project. But the idea is not to focus ONLY on that, as if you succeed the problem will demand a complete overhaul of the project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 8:00 am and is filed under technology, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.