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[–] mastercactapus 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Imagine you and some friends were playing apples-to-apples. Then imagine hundreds or thousands of people show up to play. Everyone from the grocery store, everyone from school, the whole town. If you just buy more games, then yes, everyone can play sure. But they wont be playing the same game; and you need everyone playing at the same time, the same game. (e.g. if you make a post, or upvoat, everyone needs to see it) So now you have enough cards, but now each round who ever is being the judge needs to go through thousands of cards and it takes forever.

The problem with scaling is that not all parts can scale like that. You can get more servers, but somehow all of those new servers need to be in sync. If you make a post on one server, it needs to store that somewhere that all the other servers can see it, but all the other servers are also submitting posts. The places where these issues come up are often referred to as bottlenecks. Fixing or widening these "bottlenecks" is most likely where most of the time is being spent.

Additionally most of these problems require solving problems creatively, writing code or tools etc.. And it's not really something you can just push more people at either. Puzzles take time to solve, and it takes time to work through those scalability problems. Especially on short notice. It's kind of like wack-a-mole sometimes.

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[–] ghostwriter [S] ago 

Thank you for you excellent response, I get it now. Sorry I couldn't reply sooner, Voat was down...