Tim Starling wrote:
In 2003 the problem was lack of hardware.
You were able to solve the problem by adding hardware. Whether
that is a victory or a failure is a matter of opinion.
We disabled every non-essential feature: just
about every query
page, search, even watchlists at times.
Yes, blindly hacking away, disabling useful functions at random,
instead of analyzing where the bottlenecks were. It was very
embarrasing to watch. The growth numbers in 2002-2003 for
susning.nu (which still runs on a single server) show what
software optimization can do, should you have chosen that path.
At the time, we were using larousse, an 850 MHz P3, for our PHP
processing. You were sharing a load balanced cluster of apaches. Yes,
you were only paying $50/month for it, but it's likely you were
subsidised by their smaller customers. And we were serving 8 times as
much traffic. I really don't think you appreciate the challenge we
faced. And like Dori said, we did use profiling data to optimise the code.
References: