Dealing with marketing types...

[Mike Meyer]

Andrew Dalke <dalke at dalkescientific.com> writes:
> Paul Rubin replied to me:
>> As for "big", hmm, I'd say as production web sites go, 100k users is
>> medium sized, Slashdot is "largish", Ebay is "big", Google is huge.
> I'ld say that few sites have >100k users, much less
> daily users with personalized information. As a totally made-up
> number, only few dozens of sites (maybe a couple hundred?) would
> need to worry about those issues.

I'd say quite a *lot* of sites have >100k users. A small client of
mine was a (now defunct .com) that was focused on "community
building". They had a user base of a couple of million people, and
you've probably never heard of The Park. They ran six servers,
thousands of simultaneous users, and it was all built on LAMP.

If you go looking for sites that offer the same kinds of things they
did - free web hosting, free web-based email, web-based chat,
calendering services, etc., you'll find a lot of such sites, and they
all probably have more than 100K users.

Of course, when you're talking about millions of web sites, a "few
sites" could be a a fairly large number of them.

An article I read recently made the point that I think you're trying
to make. The author argued that for most sites, scalability just
wasn't that big an issue. Web sites are cheap enough that they are
affordable to relatively small communities, and in many cases a
service that would bomb if they tried to go global with it would be a
big success in a small community. As such, he expects the web to be
dominated by sites that are really only of interest to a small
community. For those sites, LAMP will work just fine.

           <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.