from Hacker News

Discord Serves 15M Users on One Server

by afhammad on 1/9/24, 5:12 PM with 7 comments

• by kevincox on 1/9/24, 7:51 PM

  It is important to node here that by "Server" they mean the Discord logical server concept which may more generically be called a "community", "group" or "workspace". It has nothing to do with the physical compute architecture.

  So a title that would make sense to people not familiar with Discord terminology could be:

  > How Discord Serves 15M Members of a Single Workspace

• by giancarlostoro on 1/9/24, 5:39 PM

  These type of articles are always fun, though I mistakenly thought they meant Discord was running on a single hardware server, that would be fun to read. Though considering they run on BEAM they can spread out the workload plenty. Still, I remember when the hard limit for a Discord used to be 1 million, and then along came MidJourney.

  It's funny how in hindsight simple changes to major web applications have a major impact. I remember, Tumblr used to show you every statistic about your blog on the dashboard, that meant every single time someone hit the front-page they had to query the latest data to show you your follower count. Sometime after they removed it from the Dashboard, I noticed Tumblr went offline / down significantly less, I doubt that was the only optimization they did, but I presume they did loads of optimizations to their platform at the time.

• by nbittich on 1/9/24, 7:28 PM

  After I opened the link, there was a big chunk of text about AI, then a popup asking me to subscribe appeared, and I closed the tab.

• by WayToDoor on 1/10/24, 9:49 PM

  The original source, the discord article [0], gives the same information, but with imo better explanations and no AI stuff at the top

  [0] https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...