On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 11:52 PM, <ocalderon@solucionesaplicativas.com> wrote:
> Thank you all of you for your answers! It helps me a lot because when I'm trying to convince a client to migrate to
PostgreSQLsometimes they think that because it's free, it only works for small databases for web or desktop
applicationswith a few users...
It's worth noting, by the way, that even options that "scale badly"
are often well used. How many huge web sites do you know of that are
built using Ruby on Rails? That's a system that actually cannot scale
past one CPU core, on its own; but there are ways around that by
bolting stuff to the outside (eg Apache and Passenger). And a single
core of a single computer with even a moderate amount of memory by
today's standards (just a few gig, say) can serve a fair amount of
traffic without noticing it. I have a server sitting a couple of
meters from me that's getting fairly old now - single-core CPU, 2GB
RAM, Ubuntu Karmic, etc - and it's happily serving a number of
community web sites. Not huge traffic of course, but we're talking a
few thousand hits per day per web site, up to 5-10K perhaps for the
busier ones... and the server barely gets above 0.01 load average. I
could handle a hundred times that traffic easily. In terms of database
load, it takes hundreds of transactions per *second* to be called
busy, but unless you have insane concentration in peak periods, that
represents upwards of 8,640,000 actions per day. There's a huge gap
between "desktop app with a few users" and ten million transactions a
day.
ChrisA
