[dj_mc_merlin]

> I would expect 800 users to fit on a single Postgres or even SQLite box

You can serve thousands of concurrent users on less-than-laptop resources -- we do. If you get a big dedicated server you can serve more concurrent users than you'll likely ever have customers. Modern relational databases are just very good.

StackOverflow's stack (https://stackexchange.com/performance) is 4 huge Postgres servers. They probably cost less than our AWS bill for a couple months, which makes me jealous. Postgres scales.

[littlecranky67]

AFAIK they use MSSQL, not postgres. And they only use one (another is a replicated hot spare) for Stackoverflow.

[sofixa]

> StackOverflow's stack (https://stackexchange.com/performance) is 4 huge Postgres servers. They probably cost less than our AWS bill for a couple months, which makes me jealous. Postgres scales.

Yeah, because everything is actually served from their caches because they're extremely read heavy.

[pmontra]

They use SQL Server

2016 https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-arc...

2022 https://hanselminutes.com/847/engineering-stack-overflow-wit...

1.5 TB RAM

[dj_mc_merlin]

I guarantee that whatever traffic is getting past their cache is still 100x higher than 90% of startups.. People really do try to run before they can walk.