Phil_Payne - 11:46 pm on May 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

> buy more machines, and fast.

Not that easy. As any [mainframe] capacity planner will tell you until terminal boredom sets in (even if the bar is free) scalability is never linear. If you buy as many machines again as you have, you will never achieve twice the throughput.

Designing an application for multi-processor scalability is not trivial. Make it multi-system within a datacenter and then multi-datacenter and you get into the realms of inspiration and prayer.

The "Google dance" was an obvious manifestation of these effects, but that was essentially a SERPs-only effect. Now it's spread to the other functionality - crawling, indexing, vetting for transgressions, etc.

Spending, as has been said, $1.5 billion is one issue. But when the kit is delivered, will Google's infrastructure exploit it?