alt Hacker News> SQLite on the same machine is akin to calling fwrite.
Actually 35% faster than fwrite [1].
> This is also a system constraint as it forces a one-database-per-instance design
You can scale incredibly far on a single node and have much better up time than github or anthropic. At this rate maybe even AWS/cloudflare.
> you need to serve traffic beyond your local region
Postgres still has a single node that can write. So most of the time you end up region sharding anyway. Sharding SQLite is straight forward.
> This is fine if you're putting together a site for your neighborhood's mom and pop shop, but once you need to handle a request baseline beyond a few hundreds TPS
It's actually pretty good for running a real time multiplayer app with a billion datapoints on a 5$ VPS [2]. There's nothing clever going on here, all the state is on the server and the backend is fast.
> but you're now compelled to find "clever" strategies to sync state across nodes.
That's the neat part you don't. Because, for most things that are not uplink limited (being a CDN, Netflix, Dropbox) a single node is all you need.
Replies
> You can scale incredibly far on a single node
Nonsense. You can't outrun physics. The latency across the Atlantic is already ~100ms, and from the US to Asia Pacific can be ~300ms. If you are interested in performance and you need to shave off ~200ms in latency, you deploy an instance closer to your users. It makes absolutely no sense to frame the rationale around performance if your systems architecture imposes a massive performance penalty in networking just to shave a couple of ms in roundtrips to a data store. Absurd.
May be an "out" there question, but any tech book suggestions you'd recommend that can teach an average dev on how to build highly performant software with minimal systems?
I feel like the advice from people with your experience is worth way way way way more than what you'd hear from big tech. Like what you said yourself, big tech tends to recommend extremely complicated systems that only seem worth maintaining if you have a trillion dollar monopoly behind it.