I don't think most startups really understand how their systems scale, so assume they'll scale like a social media platform (which do not scale well at all).
I attribute a lot of my performance to initially targeting very low powered hardware. I ran it on a raspberry pi cluster until the index was around 1 million documents (I think). Having those limitations early on excluded a lot of design mistakes that would have been a lot harder to correct later.
Serving search requests is a embarrassingly parallel operation that could be very easily load balanced to different instances. If so Max Schrems hectored every other search engine out of Europe, and Ursula von der Leyen, taking pity on my living room search operation, sent me a bunch of money, I'd probably be able to deal with 1000x the traffic about as fast as I'd be able to lease space in a datacenter.
I am a bit choked in terms of how big I can grow my index, though. I could probably double, maybe even a couple of times, but not too many times if I can't find serious optimizations.
I attribute a lot of my performance to initially targeting very low powered hardware. I ran it on a raspberry pi cluster until the index was around 1 million documents (I think). Having those limitations early on excluded a lot of design mistakes that would have been a lot harder to correct later.
Serving search requests is a embarrassingly parallel operation that could be very easily load balanced to different instances. If so Max Schrems hectored every other search engine out of Europe, and Ursula von der Leyen, taking pity on my living room search operation, sent me a bunch of money, I'd probably be able to deal with 1000x the traffic about as fast as I'd be able to lease space in a datacenter.
I am a bit choked in terms of how big I can grow my index, though. I could probably double, maybe even a couple of times, but not too many times if I can't find serious optimizations.