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Okay but this is where I get confused. Why does Discord need a single database system when discord servers are independent, right?

And the volume of traffic per Discord server must be human-processable or what would the point be? A Discord server doing 800k writes per second makes no sense.

So why not a RDBMS per Discord server, and if you want to ship all that out to a warehouse for analytics you do that as a separate problem?

Or is it that spinning up a Postgres instance per Discord server ends up being significantly more expensive than these mega distributed database systems?



There are ballpark of a few hundred million discord servers... do you really want to run that many Postgres instances? And even so what do you do about DM/GDMs? Easier to just run one big mega cluster for messages.


Okay so the latter then - economies of scale. Surprised to hear that few hundred million figure - I thought it'd be 1/10th of that at most! Wow.

Although I did expect there'd be a very long tail, and you might choose to host a bunch of servers on a single RDBMS, at that scale yeah it wouldn't solve much.

Thanks for coming back to me, appreciate it.


Apple kind of does something like this with iCloud however their per user "databases" are only virtual:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672




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