This article is horribly written, seemingly by someone with no actual programming experience or knowledge, or even a basic command of English grammar.<p>I mean, this passage reads like timecube (up until the very end where it becomes somewhat more cogent):<p><pre><code> Out of this came some learning such as, in terms of app
specific metrics such as ease and ‘fooplroofness’. Plus,
it emerged that “most graphs are useless”. Instead they
built dashboards to analyze the performance; they always
put lefts on values (like failed log-ins etc); and they
kept some slack such as: extra queries were memcached, and
delayed optimization of SQL queries.</code></pre>
From the comments, a link to Rajiv's technical writeup:<p><a href="http://eranki.tumblr.com/post/27076431887/scaling-lessons-learned-at-dropbox-part-1" rel="nofollow">http://eranki.tumblr.com/post/27076431887/scaling-lessons-le...</a><p>which covers some of the points in the TC article.
I think "replace the hard drive" is a terrible way to say it, since a hard drive (or SSD or SD or whatever) is exactly what you need to be able to use Dropbox.
I don't know what the big deal is scaling up. I have worked in a couple of "big scale" apps and it's really simple principles. At the end of the day, it's all about caching, powerful machines, caching, normal coding skillz, caching. And oh did I mention caching?<p>I honestly don't think it's that big a deal to 'scale'. Programs like early wolf3d impress me more, much much more. And of course, things like the recent quine relay leave me demoralized.
From <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/help/14/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/help/14/en</a>
"Dropbox's performance may start to decline when you store above 300,000 files."<p>From personal experience replace "start to decline" with "not work at all." I don't have much faith in Dropbox's growth if they can't fix this.
Here's a link to the actual talk: <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/35654239" rel="nofollow">http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/35654239</a>