--- title: How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — Curious Case... description: Discord’s Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve. In 2017, the Discord... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages-curious-case-of-system-design-w1ug8j6yc twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — Curious Case of System Design | daily.dev og:description: Discord’s Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve. In 2017, the Discord... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages-curious-case-of-system-design-w1ug8j6yc og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/W1ug8J6yC.png og:image:alt: How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — Curious Case of System Design og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — Curious Case of System Design **[gitconnected](https://daily.dev/sources/gc)** · 5 min read · 39 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Discord’s Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve. In 2017, the Discord team ran 12 Cassandra nodes, storing billions of messages. They migrated their data to ScyllaDB because they were looking for a database that was scalable and fault-tolerant. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@mamged** · 0 upvotes > tl;dr they wanted to solve cold&hot disks problem which leads to idle replicas which leads to more cost. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Don’t just attend KubeCon \+ CloudNativeCon, Merge Forward your experience\!](https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-just-attend-kubecon-cloudnativecon-merge-forward-your-experience--l0rpp73x8) · CNCF · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Announcing H2 2026 KCDs](https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-h2-2026-kcds-m96goajm1) · CNCF · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Two months of Open Community Groups](https://daily.dev/posts/two-months-of-open-community-groups-asf52zhbs) · CNCF · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [CNCF Unveils Schedule for KubeCon \+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/cncf-unveils-schedule-for-kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe-2026-ikhcoa5cb) · CNCF · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [CNCF Debuts KubeCon \+ CloudNativeCon Japan 2026 Schedule](https://daily.dev/posts/cncf-debuts-kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026-schedule-xp5pyudub) · CNCF · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#apache-cassandra](https://daily.dev/tags/apache-cassandra), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#database](https://daily.dev/tags/database), [#discord](https://daily.dev/tags/discord), [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#nosql](https://daily.dev/tags/nosql), [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#scylladb](https://daily.dev/tags/scylladb), [#system-design-interview](https://daily.dev/tags/system-design-interview) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages-curious-case-of-system-design-w1ug8j6yc) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — Curious Case of System Design","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages-curious-case-of-system-design-w1ug8j6yc","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages-curious-case-of-system-design-w1ug8j6yc"},"datePublished":"2023-09-26T17:44:35.670Z","dateModified":"2024-11-16T02:16:48.367Z","description":"Discord’s Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve. 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