It's tough to generalize from things like this because "a webapp for 55k monthly users" can mean drastically different things. A user could be loading a few static pages, or that same user could be opening websocket connections or making requests that require expensive database queries. Your average user could stick around a minute, or an hour. Different apps can easily have per-monthly-user infrastructure costs that are two orders of magnitude different.
For comparison at the other end of the scale:
Facebook said that in the first quarter it spent $3.7 billion on data centers, servers, office buildings and network infrastructure.
That's something like $8 per user per year. If you had that level of expenditure for your 55k-user app, it would cost $400,000 per year, 200x the cost given by this blog post. It isn't that Facebook is wasting the vast majority of their infrastructure, though, it's that the application does a lot more for each user.
The Facebook comparison is nowhere close though. Firstly, even purely from a services perspective, the per user compute needs per person are quite insane if you take a step back and think about what all has to happen in the background. Then you have to think about how much each user uses facebook and instagram, not to mention other services like video calls and live. Further, Facebook also ostensibly spends a bunch of the resources directly making money by utilising the resources on their ad biz. And then you have all the research and prototype work Facebook does. Finally this also includes office buildings and actual machine expenditure which ostensibly will pay dividends in future years, plus being a factor that OP didnnot even include in this discussion. I'm fairly confident that for the same number of requests of compwrable complexity Facebook spends significantly less than what this person is spending.
I suspect that one particular aspect of Facebook's operations - the nation-state level of spying on its users and the people they mention - accounts for a significant part of the difference.
> It isn't that Facebook is wasting the vast majority of their infrastructure, though, it's that the application does a lot more for each user.
I don't think we can be sure Facebook isn't wasting money on their infrastructure. They've shown themselves to be pretty wasteful in the past.[0][1] They're just rich enough to get away with it.
Facebook's application may be doing a lot more to their users than a simpler app, but I doubt it's doing that much for users.
But if they can choose between saving 10% on infrastructure or adding 5% ad revenue (through more optimizations), the additional revenue is worth more.
Just running Facebook, Instagram & Co as a platform would probably be much cheaper than $8 per user.
In any system, there will be a tension between shrinking cost/benefit, and spending more to achieve better benefit-cost. This has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a fundamental aspect of systems where there is a non-fixed relationship between investment and return (i.e. almost all systems of any kind).
The notion that "[financial] investment and [financial] return" are the only two factors worth considering in "all systems of any kind" is an artefact of capitalist thinking.
That notion is something absent from both text and subtext of my comment. You are the one who inserted it. Investment and cost come in many forms other than the financial.
For comparison at the other end of the scale:
Facebook said that in the first quarter it spent $3.7 billion on data centers, servers, office buildings and network infrastructure.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/facebook-signific...
That's something like $8 per user per year. If you had that level of expenditure for your 55k-user app, it would cost $400,000 per year, 200x the cost given by this blog post. It isn't that Facebook is wasting the vast majority of their infrastructure, though, it's that the application does a lot more for each user.