[kiwidrew]

Happily, Postgres keeps improving performance with each release. According to benchmarks [1], the upcoming version 9.2 will scale up to 64 cores for read-heavy workloads. Unless your application is going to grow really fast -- keeping in mind that the hardware capabilities will continue to improve each year -- then it's just premature optimization to worry about horizontal scaling. Just upgrade your database server once a year and reap the benefits of Moore's law.

[1] http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/04/did-i-say-32-cores-how-abo...

[eckyptang]

I love your optimism. The real world doesn't work like that. The real world punishes you for every shitty feature you pick and every bad chunk of code.

Our application is 15 years old, and we're on a 64-core machine with 768Gb of RAM and 35Tb of disk.

We're running at 80% capacity.

Where do we go from here? Yes, we rewrite and scale out for the measly cost of £450k. That cost would have been avoided with the appropriate due diligence. That is not a cost anyone wants to swallow.

Then again I don't work disposable CRUD applications...