Slashdot Mirror
How Far Can Large Commercial Applications Scale?
clusteroid81 asks: "I've been working with customers who run large commercial applications on big iron (16-32 symmetric multi-processor systems - 64GB or more memory ). There are always numerous other front-end servers involved, but the application on the back end server is often difficult to spread across multiple systems or clusters due to the application architecture. Scaling is done by increasing memory and processor counts. As things progress, the bottleneck is usually contention within the application or operating system. Are there folks here on Slashdot who work with large single system commercial applications? What kind of processor counts and memory do the applications have and how well do they scale?"
It depends on how much enterprise you have in them. Enterprise is expensive, but when added liberally you can scale to huge amounts.
I like to add a couple hundred enterprise myself.
Keep studying.
Or better yet, call Blizzard and ask for tips about scalability and reliability. Then do the opposite.