[hinkley]

It’s fundamentally about choosing features based on what can be done well versus done at all. Lots of server bloat is caused by loading our applications up with features that are not cheap resource-wise. If you think about the billions of calculations and the hundreds of millions of bytes you can ship from one machine, we should be able to do something like stackoverflow in one rack with room to spare.

15 years ago we could sustain 1/10th the traffic on 1/40th of the hardware of my current project, and the old one was badly architected. If we fixed that and added all the redundancy and telemetry of today they might just about cancel out. But factor in all the hardware improvements and this is not a good look.