danny_sf45

So, I was reading Stack Overflow The Architecture - 2016 Edition [0] and one picture [1] shocked me. Five minutes ago I was reading about the IBM 360 mainframe (not sure how I ended in its Wikipedia entry). Anyway, the IBM 360 was big (big, for today standards of course), heavy and costly; my iPhone is a thousand times faster and fits in my pocket. So why did [1] shock me? I was thinking: "so, 50 years ago we had this IBM 360 thing, and now we have iPhones that are way more powerful. So, in 50 years would we be able to have a computer that fits in our pocket that has everything needed to deploy Stack Overflow?"

I'm sure the rack in picture [1] is decent for today's standards but I couldn't help but think "wow, that rack looks, big, heavy and costly!".

I was thinking about availability, performance, redundancy, security, etc. Do you think it would be possible to host the entire Stack Overflow site in my "2070 mobile phone" and serve with it millions of visitors as performant and secure as the current SO does?

[0]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/

[1]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/content/SO-Architecture/SO-Architecture-RackB-Bottom.webp

I will build a very simple classified ads website where I have:

- around 500-1K ads will be published per day. Login required

- around 10K-20K visitors per day. No login required

- simple search (by category, free text field) and sorting (by date). No login required

- one paginated homepage where ads are displayed by date, and one page to see the details of a specific ad

- no images. It's all text-based

My plan is to use nginx + Go + SQLite + redis. Big assumption I'm making here is that the website is heavy on reads and very lightweight on writes (reasonable assumption since I maintained a similar website some years ago, so I have some experience in this regard). Also, I don't see the website growing in the near future (I have numbers that say that traffic will remain as stated above at least for 1 year).

Do you think SQLite will be enough? Main reason to not use MySQL/Postgres is: maintenance, simplicity but above all I think it will be overkill. Also, I'm planning to heavily cache searches (either on nginx side or redis). So, what do you think?