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What if we treated Postgres like SQLite?

(www.maragu.dev)
75 points markusw | 3 comments | 22 Sep 25 13:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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JodieBenitez ◴[22 Sep 25 16:57 UTC] No.45336233[source]▶
> You can just install Postgres on your single big and beefy application server (because there’s just the one when you use SQLite, scaled vertically), and run your application right next to it.

Am I getting old ? Seems obvious to me.

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omarqureshi ◴[22 Sep 25 17:17 UTC] No.45336534[source]▶
Literally prior to the cloud being a thing, for medium sized web apps, this was the way.
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1. ok_computer ◴[22 Sep 25 17:52 UTC] No.45337029[source]▶
I’ve always worked in a datacenter (non cloud) with separate db servers to the app servers. Besides network latency, what is the advantage of collocating the http server and database server on one machine?

It’s always given me a separation of concerns good feeling by seeing a dedicated db and app server and doesn’t seem like much overhead, given they are nearby machines in datacenter.

Also, our main reason was sharing a database license to have a well resourced multi-tenant/app db sever serving peripheral web app servers.

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2. markusw ◴[22 Sep 25 18:06 UTC] No.45337243[source]▶
The biggest one is latency. Network latency will almost always be orders of magnitude bigger than I/O latency. There's a whole class of problems that goes away when latency becomes very small.
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3. ok_computer ◴[22 Sep 25 18:38 UTC] No.45337648[source]▶
Noted, that confirms my suspicion. Thanks.