Scalability does not mean nothing ever slows down… It’s about being able to add more compute power when it slows down, to counter-act the strain a workload puts upon your software.
A bit of a myth seemed to be there regarding do-once, done forever, and that is really a dangerous thing; because what is right for a 5000 server mega-corp is not right for a one-up-one-down small mom-and-pop shop.
Everything slows down at scale of complexity and frequency (any extreme). You can control various aspects of software (actually harder with WP than some other SW, but getting better and better than 90’s software and predecessors).
Last thing was the “we test what is possible”. This means there are holes, so you are not selling quality of solution, but rather component which is much easier to do. True code quality needs more than just unit tests, and is incredibly hard to achieve rather than aim for as once you get to a point, you find more points and improve, it’s a marathon not a race and I didn’t feel like that was being sold.
> Scalability does not mean nothing ever slows down…
Let’s take a very simple example to illustrate what I mean. A developer write a WP_Query and set the `posts_per_page` argument to `-1`. Great it works at the time because there are only 10 posts in the db, but as the `wp_posts`table grows, the site becomes slower and slower. If you do that on a site with a million posts (could be even more), adding compute power won’t be the solution 😉
> This means there are holes, so you are not selling quality of solution
If I am not mistaken, the audience question was about Unit Tests on third party products. My answer to that is that everything built in house for a project should be testable and tested (no holes), but some third party products are not tested and you can’t do anything about that since it’s Core doesn’t belong to you. The audience mentioned WooCommerce and extensions for example. Out of curiousity, do you write Unit Tests for third party plugins like WooCommerce extensions?
Was an interesting talk, not getting away from that, so thank you for sharing. I was merely attempting to reciprocate by suggesting a different way to put across points mentioned, maybe refine.
Absolutely everything is on a spectrum (more accurately a matrix of points on own spectrum).
If you want me to I can address your points made but both mis-framed my points and I don’t want to upset you or cause offence so sorry if that has happened.
Code quality truly matters! This talk is about understanding why investing in quality development is key, from a business point of view as well as a for technical reasons.
December 9, 2016 at 10:43 am |
Scalability does not mean nothing ever slows down… It’s about being able to add more compute power when it slows down, to counter-act the strain a workload puts upon your software.
A bit of a myth seemed to be there regarding do-once, done forever, and that is really a dangerous thing; because what is right for a 5000 server mega-corp is not right for a one-up-one-down small mom-and-pop shop.
Everything slows down at scale of complexity and frequency (any extreme). You can control various aspects of software (actually harder with WP than some other SW, but getting better and better than 90’s software and predecessors).
Last thing was the “we test what is possible”. This means there are holes, so you are not selling quality of solution, but rather component which is much easier to do. True code quality needs more than just unit tests, and is incredibly hard to achieve rather than aim for as once you get to a point, you find more points and improve, it’s a marathon not a race and I didn’t feel like that was being sold.
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December 14, 2016 at 12:17 am |
Hi @lewiscowles2015,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> Scalability does not mean nothing ever slows down…
Let’s take a very simple example to illustrate what I mean. A developer write a WP_Query and set the `posts_per_page` argument to `-1`. Great it works at the time because there are only 10 posts in the db, but as the `wp_posts`table grows, the site becomes slower and slower. If you do that on a site with a million posts (could be even more), adding compute power won’t be the solution 😉
> This means there are holes, so you are not selling quality of solution
If I am not mistaken, the audience question was about Unit Tests on third party products. My answer to that is that everything built in house for a project should be testable and tested (no holes), but some third party products are not tested and you can’t do anything about that since it’s Core doesn’t belong to you. The audience mentioned WooCommerce and extensions for example. Out of curiousity, do you write Unit Tests for third party plugins like WooCommerce extensions?
Thanks,
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December 14, 2016 at 8:11 am |
Hi @ThierryMuller
Was an interesting talk, not getting away from that, so thank you for sharing. I was merely attempting to reciprocate by suggesting a different way to put across points mentioned, maybe refine.
Absolutely everything is on a spectrum (more accurately a matrix of points on own spectrum).
If you want me to I can address your points made but both mis-framed my points and I don’t want to upset you or cause offence so sorry if that has happened.
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December 16, 2016 at 1:46 am |
See this on the difference between performance and scalability http://conferences.oreilly.com/software-architecture/sa-ny/public/content/evolution-of-software-architecture 11-13 minutes.
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