Yep, this is what I think about when “scaling” is mentioned. Maybe I’m too distributed-compute brained, but throwing CPU at a db isn’t what I was hoping would be the answer.

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_3u10 5 hours ago | parent [-]

So the point of distributed compute is to reduce the compute needed? I’ve generally found that distributed compute requires more compute than vertical scaling while getting clobbered by network bandwidth / latency.

Theoretically with 2 to 10x compute required and in practice 100 to 500x

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literalAardvark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The point of distributed computing is to do computing that you can't do on a vertically scaled system or to increase availability.

If you're doing it for other reasons it's usually a mistake.

	▲	raddan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The advice I’ve gotten is that you want to move computation to data that is already distributed. The cost of moving large amounts of data usually dwarfs compute costs (usually, not always), and so the performance win comes from distributing the computation and then (depending on the problem) centralizing aggregate results.