this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Most probably off-the-shelf hardware, but with software optimized out the wazoo. Like, reading directly from SSDs instead of using a filesystem. Or more likely using an in-memory database like Redis, perhaps with custom additions.
I knew a guy who went on to work for CloudFlare. Back at that job, he made a write-only static-file storage in Node.js, dumping the contents into a giant file bypassing the filesystem and its metadata overhead. That's the kind of optimization you want — pretty similar to what database engines like MySQL/PostgreSQL do (iirc one of them does in fact support using a plain disk partition for the database).
Back in early-mid 2010s I've read an article on Pornhub's architecture. They ran Redis behind Haproxy load balancers. An in-memory database, behind load balancers. Some people say that it's normal, but I've never had conditions calling for such a thing instead of sharding harder.