[throwaway012377]

> "why does Netflix need X thousand engineers, I could build it in a weekend"

Believe me or not, I was in a company doing web file streaming in 2009 using Nginx, sendfile and SSL offloading on the NIC.

It was installed by one dude. A standard Linux distro, standard kernel and no custom software. Just compile the SSL offloading kernel module once.

[yibg]

And how many concurrent users did you have?

[throwaway012377]

It was about large file streaming so bandwidth is the bottleneck, not number of users. What matters is that the configuration was good enough to use the NICs at 100%

[summerlight]

Yeah, that's perhaps nice (and hopefully moderately interesting) enough for a hobbyist work. Good luck for multiplying the scale by 1,000,000 for many dimensions.

[throwaway012377]

Completely wrong. The configuration I described was replicated on different servers and they scale linearly, obviously. It was saturating the NICs and therefore would have been good enough for Netflix at the time.

It's strange that you assumed otherwise.