Our bulk storage disk sees very little in the way of IOPS-requested. (An entire Gbps pipe couldn't fill the IO capacity of 4U of the 1TB SATA drives we use for bulk upload storage, and we have way more than that. ;) ) DB and hosts disks are another story entirely, and I have to admit that we don't really account for all those costs as "upload related" (by and large, they are not upload-driven) so we have some model inaccuracy there as well, but for every 2MB file we have on SATA, we probably have 20-40K in thumbnails on faster disk and well under 1K in fairly narrow, and not heavily indexed DB rows on 2 tables.
As for listening to a bozo on website...well, HN is by and large not bozo-filled, it was pretty clear you weren't one, had given some thought to this problem, and I'm more than ready to admit when I'm potentially able to learn from someone else something that might save me/my company money.
It does sound like your app has substantial sub-linear cost components, and I admit ours has some smaller ones as well but that we just don't model them tightly enough to see those components.
Thanks for the info, and I wish you the best in your endeavor(s).
Our bulk storage disk sees very little in the way of IOPS-requested. (An entire Gbps pipe couldn't fill the IO capacity of 4U of the 1TB SATA drives we use for bulk upload storage, and we have way more than that. ;) ) DB and hosts disks are another story entirely, and I have to admit that we don't really account for all those costs as "upload related" (by and large, they are not upload-driven) so we have some model inaccuracy there as well, but for every 2MB file we have on SATA, we probably have 20-40K in thumbnails on faster disk and well under 1K in fairly narrow, and not heavily indexed DB rows on 2 tables.
As for listening to a bozo on website...well, HN is by and large not bozo-filled, it was pretty clear you weren't one, had given some thought to this problem, and I'm more than ready to admit when I'm potentially able to learn from someone else something that might save me/my company money.
It does sound like your app has substantial sub-linear cost components, and I admit ours has some smaller ones as well but that we just don't model them tightly enough to see those components.
Thanks for the info, and I wish you the best in your endeavor(s).