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by 9dev 604 days ago
> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.
1 comments
ndriscoll 604 days ago
At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason.

I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160 N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down that particular road to insanity.

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ffsm8 604 days ago
> ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability

Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the ability to scale each microservices separately almost never improves the actual performance of the platform as a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls between each service and could've also just started the monolith twice. And that would've most likely even needed less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume more - after all, you now need less applications running to serve the same request.

This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas platform with very moderate usage, almost everything being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making data entries etc.

I'm always unsure how I should feel after such discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On the other hand... Well... ( ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ )

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