[mmt]

> Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation.

My impression, from attempting to evangelize scaling "up" before scaling "out" (because it's both cheaper and much lower effort/labor/time) is that vanishingly few programmers have any idea what a "beefy" installation would even look like.

I routinely encounter implicit assumptions (partially driven, these days, anyway, by what VPS and cloud providers off) that the "largest" servers 2U (or 4U, if I'm lucky) and are I/O limited by the number of disks they an hold in their chassis.

Similarly, there seems to be a lack of awareness of just how big main memory can be on a single server, even before paying a price premium for higher-density modules.

Not knowing where the price-performance curve inflection points (for memory and/or CPU) happen to be also seems to be associated with not knowing where the price tops out. It's as if they fear the biggest server they can (and will be forced to) buy will cost a million bucks, rather than $100k.