Oh for sure, I know it's overboard. That was a strategic decision. I'd rather overspend a few thousand to make sure Open Beta is successful. I'd rather scale down than have to hurriedly scale up.

There are also other considerations. You are using dedicated hardware, are you not? You get guaranteed performance. Since we're on virtual slices, it's very likely that at least some percentage of our infrastructure is going to be hindered by other people we have no control over.

Also, our databases are physically on SATA drives. Slow I/O. We have to go overkill on the memcache to reduce I/O. My benchmarks (bonnie++) show a relative lot of variability to the read/write speed of the slices. I'm pretty paranoid about it, so I'm going overkill.

Another point against us is that Slicehost has limits on the throughput of your network interfaces. Each machine is limited to 50Mbps, and I'm kind of paranoid about having a few large slices and saturating the network. Spreading out gives us more flexibility to keep the overall system load very low and hopefully not run into that problem.

But yeah. For sure it's overkill, probably by a lot.