Great feedback!
To be brutally honest, we don’t optimize for this in our open source facing installs because:
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The vast, overwhelming majority of open source Discourse installs are small or medium size and easily covered by the all-in-one container solution.
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Even a larger install is comfortably covered by a fairly simple isolated web / data container setup, so you can update / restart without interrupting service.
- Our hosting business involves running Discourse at massive scale; while we are obviously in no way opposed to others running Discourse hosting businesses themselves, or otherwise hosting Discourse at massive scale, it does not exactly align with our business interests to make it one-button easy for someone to click a button and scale Discourse to a billion active users on a single site.
So there’s very little incentive for us to improve case #3, massive scale, because a) few need it and b) it’s a major source of income and survival for our business in the form of our enterprise hosting plan, where we are literally selling deep knowledge of Discourse as we wrote it in the first place.
That said, if you’d like to contribute effort towards making the open source story for case #3 better, we’re completely open to that.