[jameshart]

Right - Marc Gravell and Tim Craver, who worked on the core architecture of Stack Overflow, were both so obsessive about extracting performance from .net web applications that when they couldn’t do any more from the outside, they both quit and went to work for Microsoft on performance improvements in the framework itself.

I feel like it’s similar to how people point to Craigslist as evidence that you can still build sites in Perl - ignoring the fact that Craigslist has Larry Wall on a retainer.

Running highly scalable monoliths is easy! As long as you’re willing to hire some of the five to ten people in the world who are capable of advancing the state of the art of development on that technology stack…

[BackBlast]

Except that servers are literally 50-100x more powerful than they were when these sites were built. You just don't need legendary talent anymore to accomplish pretty reasonable scaling with a simple low server count architecture.

[abalashov]

It's true! Hardware is powerful enough nowadays to run all those needless microservices and containers. ;-)

[winrid]

You don't, really. You can use Django or Perl today and just enable nginx caching for non authenticated users, for many applications.

Stack Overflow didn't need these optimizations. They could have just deployed 20 servers instead and still been profitable. People optimized just because they like to.

[jameshart]

Yes, Microsoft SQL Server is famous for its ability to get faster just by adding more servers.

[winrid]

The discussion isn't really around the DB/SQL Server. As far as I could tell, we were discussing .NET and optimizations in its ORM.

[sathyabhat]

Minor correction but that’s Nick Craver https://nickcraver.com/

[tcgv]

> Running highly scalable monoliths is easy! As long as you’re willing to hire some of the five to ten people in the world who are capable of advancing the state of the art of development on that technology stack…

I truly believe that being able to design and run a modular monolith application effectively (not talking about the 'hyperscale' scenario here) should be a prerequisite for designing and running a set of interconnected microsservices. The challenge is similar, but dealing with modular monoliths has the advantage of not having to deal with the uncertainty of networking programming (i.e. remote calls, network error handling, distributed transactions).

[thunderbong]

I think the other point being - very few applications need this kind of scaling.