I gave him one on your behalf. Now if you upmod this comment you will no longer owe me one ;)

Done! :-P

Now up-mod me again. Let me know when you've done it, and if we keep this up we might find out whether pg imposed any limit on commenting depth ;-)

now you both owe me.

... until you have them.

Not really. When you have them, that means you have lots of users. Any problem associated with lots of users is a great problem to have.

I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to punch people who've told me that in the face when I was sleeping for 2 hours day for a month.

Yeah, lack of sleep makes me irascible too.

Looking back today, would you have preferred a perfectly engineered system with no users?

I think the technically correct answer to your question is "door number three".

I'd watch out, though, because if I were blader I'd be sorely tempted to answer by punching you in the face. :) It's not like you didn't receive fair warning!

It's a fallacy to think that you can avoid all scalability problems. You can't. If you're successful, you will have scalability issues, period. So yes, since the problem is inevitable so long as you're successful, it is a nice problem to have.

It's a bit like having a cold. That's practically inevitable at some point in your life if you're alive. Well, I'd rather be alive with a cold than dead, even though having a cold sucks. If you don't want scalability issues, they're very easy to avoid: just build a crappy service. One of my start-ups never had any scalability issues, and never had a stampede of users either.