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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> You may make use of the Licensed Work provided your application or service uses the Licensed Work with no more than one SpacetimeDB instance in production and provided that you do not use the Licensed Work for a Database Service.
Therefore, as an OSS product, SpacetimeDB does not scale.
I would add a few other things to the list of scaling problems. Some SQL features are hard to scale out (auto_increment/serial columns, unique secondary keys, foreign keys, etc.). Some SQL query operators are hard to scale out for OLTP queries that want low latency and high throughput (DISTINCT, LIMIT/TOP-N, non-collocated joins). I take it SpacetimeDB is a nosql database, so these problems are less important to them?
As to how spacetimedb plans to scale out, I didn't follow it fully. It's hard to take the spacetimedb folks seriously (see: https://strn.cat/posts/spacetime/).
Most notably, almost the entire commentary about durability is incorrect. SpacetimeDB does not acknowledge anything before data is fully persisted to disk, even though he claims it does. Clients CAN chose to listen before that, but you can do the same thing in Postgres if you want.
There is no 50 ms delay to writing to disk. The article is mostly nonsense.
Ask Claude yourself: https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB
He spent 15 minutes looking at our code (by his own admission), having never written a database storage engine before AFAIK, and made a pronouncement that SpacetimeDB wasn't a good database. Crazy stuff.
The guy is currently a micro-celebrity for the storage engine he wrote: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale
I have doubts that a global readwrite lock around a hashtable makes for a good general purpose storage system.
Calling it a "hashtable" is something that only someone who hasn't built a DB engine would do. It's incredibly naive. It discounts the complexity of execution, atomicity, durability, constraint validation, migrations, query planning, incremental query evaluation, down to zero. It really makes it sound like he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
Besides, it's a btree.
- Returning it as a result to a SQL query - Sending it to clients as part of a subscription - Or a return value to the caller
I think one of the maybe less talked about benefits of distributed SQL is support for nearly transparent rolling upgrades of the database with very little impact to a running workload. Spanner is best in class at this.
This article hooked me with the comparison at the beginning.
I used to scoff at redis' single threaded design but it makes sense in a memory bound db. This article is a great example of taking that high-performance approach and designing parallelization around it. SO COOOL.
Also, it's SO interesting that here's yet another example of how performant the actor model can be. It's an old design (Communicating Sequential Processes was published in 1984!) but it works so well in our current hardware.
From a developer's perspective actors are very easy to reason about. I'm curious to try out Spacetime in a project now. Organizing server logic into databases, sub-databases, tables and reducers is intriguing.
This is a VM with 64 vCPUs running at 3.5GHz, with 256GB RAM.
It presently costs about ~3USD per hour to run.
> The most significant (but not sole) reason SpacetimeDB is faster than other backends is that we have decreased the round trip time between your server and your database by at least 99.95%. In SpacetimeDB your application server, ORM, and database are merged into a single system, so all three of these are run within the same process. [1]
For most systems that is a fair assumption to make but SQLite blurs the lines by running in-process. They admitted that this makes a significant difference on X [2] but do not list those results on their benchmarks. It would ruin their "is that the X axis or is that the competition" line to include. I'm hung up on this because they market it for use in video game servers, with an emphasis on MMORPGs (they're making one). Literally nobody is using web APIs for networking in real-time multiplayer games. The benchmarks are completely meaningless for that use case.
On the topic of scale they have been testing sharding/IDC for a while in BitCraft Online (their MMORPG) but they peaked at less than 5,000 concurrent players [3]. That's small enough to comfortably run on a single machine. Especially if you know that their gameplay is 90% (or more) just waiting on timers to finish. The timers only progress when you're connected to the server so that CCU number includes all the players waiting on timers.
[1] https://spacetimedb.com/blog/benchmarking [2] https://x.com/spacetimedb/status/2027766319462904310 [3] https://steamcharts.com/app/3454650
> The benchmarks are completely meaningless for that use case.
I wouldn't say completely meaningless, but it isn't a game benchmark that's true. We feel very comfortable that it's the most performant backend for persistent games though. We were trying to show it's also more performant for web use cases.
We hoped for tens of users.