In most cases, ‘bigger’ has always been considered to be better. This has been obvious for years in the skyscraper wars and throughout the 60’s with the American auto manufacturers each out-doing one another with larger and larger displacement engines. In the computer world this translates to the ‘scale up’ or ‘scale out’ models of thinking. One can argue in either direction depending on the specific requirements of the project at hand.
Taking the “bigger is better” mentality into application configuration tends to be where things quickly fall apart. Without fully understanding what certain configuration values do and how a simple change in something like the MaxClients value in Apache will affect the number available connections to your MySQL database; a novice systems administrator can quickly bring even the biggest hardware to its knees. I see cases like this day-in and day-out in various configurations ranging from a Web server to NFS server. I’ll show a few specific examples of cases where bigger was clearly not better.
