A few commenters are right to point out about the previous article that 6 requests per second (550k in a day) doesn’t seem like all that much. Very true, indeed.
So, what’s the point?
Lots of people wonder if Rails will “scale” – as if there’s a single magic bullet to scaling.
The more accurate question people should be asking is, how much will it cost to scale?
Anyone can scale a site by throwing $10,000 Sun boxes at the problem on dedicated T3 lines. The real goal is to scale efficiently, economically and as linearly as possible.
Google’s solved this problem rather nicely—they scale using commodity off-the-shelf hardware. If they kept having to buy $20k boxes, then $50k boxes, then $100k clusters, each time they needed to expand, then the entire premise of their search business would crumble as their profit margins dwindled.
550k in Perspective – CPMs
There’s no advertising on Incredimazing – but other content sites that I operate, which do have advertising, obtain roughly $3 CPMs.
That’s ~ $3 for every 1,000 pageviews. Of course these visitors are coming from Google and all over the place, not Digg. (social media site users are notoriously anti-advertising)
So let’s say we get our $3 as usual CPM on some monster traffic site that we’ve eventually built up to 550,000 pageviews per day.
That’s $1,650 in revenue per day or $49,500 per month. Our $400 server could accommodate this nicely as we’ve seen, costing us only ~1% of our monthly revenues.
More than 6 Requests / Second
It should also be noted that the traffic was very ‘bursty’—probably about 300k of it came over the course of several hours, just as it hit the front-page and then for several hours after that. So the 6 requests per second figure is actually lower than it was in reality.
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