5 ms·

People forget that the two methods of scaling are HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL. They think: "I can just put some micro-services behind HA proxy and boom, more capaci

People forget that the two methods of scaling are HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL. They think: "I can just put some micro-services behind HA proxy and boom, more capacity!". And then they forget if they had just modified that one query and tweaked that one for-loop they could've had that same capacity without launching six new servers with all kinds of potential for the wiring to go down and cause downtime. Plus the dev time to build the services.

aianus 10y ago
Vertical scaling requires hiring good engineers instead of mediocre ones (additional cost of $100,000s per year across the team). Horizontal scaling in comparison is much, much cheaper for your average CRUD app.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. For example choosing Java over Ruby would give you 2-10x better perf per server... and I am not sure that Java devs cost any more or less than Ruby devs. Now we can get into an argument about developer productivity and all that.. but form a purely "i want to run 10x more users per server"... something like Java / Ruby gets you a long ways.
  - joslin01 10y ago
    I talked to a CTO once that said he brought his RoR fleet down from 60 servers to 6-8 by switching to Scala.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      When he said "switching to Scala" I reckon he probably meant "rewriting our platform." It's very difficult to do a comparison like this in practice, because switching languages inherently involves a rewrite of a platform.
      - collyw 10y ago
        I am curious how much a rewrite staying in Ruby could have saved. Its always easier to write code when you have a good specification, and a working application would fulfill that role well.
    - FooBarWidget 10y ago
      I was once involved in a large-scale government project that rewrote a Java app to RoR. They went from 50 servers to 10. It has probably got more to do with the rewrite and the new architecture than whatever language it was written in.
      - wstrange 10y ago
        Or the fact that new servers are an order of magnitude faster than the ones they replaced.
        Drdrdrq 10y ago
        Order of magnitude faster? I doubt that. Unless the old ones were really old / slow to begin with. But really, we are both speculating without knowing the facts.
      - joslin01 10y ago
        What? It absolutely has to do with the language. Ruby binary trees: 57 seconds Scala binary trees: 11 seconds [1] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/ruby.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/ruby.html [2] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/scala.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/scala.html
        FooBarWidget 10y ago
        That would mean something if Ruby apps are 100% Ruby and/or are performing binary tree operations all the time, or doing similar kinds of CPU-intensive operations as depicted in the alioth benchmarks. But they don't. Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. A lot of expensive things are offloaded to C libraries. Things like XML parsing are offloaded to native libraries like libxml; nobody uses an XML parser fully implemented in Ruby. Ruby does not reimplemented gzip compression in Ruby, it uses zlib. So the alioth benchmarks are not representative of real-world performance.
        deleted 10y ago
  - aianus 10y ago
    > I am not sure that Java devs cost any more or less than Ruby devs I don't know about that, how many bootcamps are pumping out Java programmers instead of Python/Ruby programmers?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Well in Chicago some of the colleges are pumping out Java Devs... I guess if you are comparing a 4 year college Java dev to a 6 week bootcamp Ruby dev you have something, but that seems weird...
bane 10y ago
I usually think of scaling in 3 methods: horizontal (add more machines), vertical (get a bigger machine) and inward (improve your algorithms). The largest performance gains I've seen are most often of the inward type -- like multi-thousands of percent, just by rethinking the code or the approach. Bonus, improving inward scaling multiplies investments in horizontal and vertical scaling.

aianus 10y ago

Vertical scaling requires hiring good engineers instead of mediocre ones (additional cost of $100,000s per year across the team). Horizontal scaling in comparison is much, much cheaper for your average CRUD app.

brianwawok 10y ago
Maybe, maybe not. For example choosing Java over Ruby would give you 2-10x better perf per server... and I am not sure that Java devs cost any more or less than Ruby devs. Now we can get into an argument about developer productivity and all that.. but form a purely "i want to run 10x more users per server"... something like Java / Ruby gets you a long ways.
- joslin01 10y ago
  I talked to a CTO once that said he brought his RoR fleet down from 60 servers to 6-8 by switching to Scala.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    When he said "switching to Scala" I reckon he probably meant "rewriting our platform." It's very difficult to do a comparison like this in practice, because switching languages inherently involves a rewrite of a platform.
    - collyw 10y ago
      I am curious how much a rewrite staying in Ruby could have saved. Its always easier to write code when you have a good specification, and a working application would fulfill that role well.
  - FooBarWidget 10y ago
    I was once involved in a large-scale government project that rewrote a Java app to RoR. They went from 50 servers to 10. It has probably got more to do with the rewrite and the new architecture than whatever language it was written in.
    - wstrange 10y ago
      Or the fact that new servers are an order of magnitude faster than the ones they replaced.
      - Drdrdrq 10y ago
        Order of magnitude faster? I doubt that. Unless the old ones were really old / slow to begin with. But really, we are both speculating without knowing the facts.
    - joslin01 10y ago
      What? It absolutely has to do with the language. Ruby binary trees: 57 seconds Scala binary trees: 11 seconds [1] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/ruby.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/ruby.html [2] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/scala.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/scala.html
      - FooBarWidget 10y ago
        That would mean something if Ruby apps are 100% Ruby and/or are performing binary tree operations all the time, or doing similar kinds of CPU-intensive operations as depicted in the alioth benchmarks. But they don't. Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. A lot of expensive things are offloaded to C libraries. Things like XML parsing are offloaded to native libraries like libxml; nobody uses an XML parser fully implemented in Ruby. Ruby does not reimplemented gzip compression in Ruby, it uses zlib. So the alioth benchmarks are not representative of real-world performance.
        deleted 10y ago
- aianus 10y ago
  > I am not sure that Java devs cost any more or less than Ruby devs I don't know about that, how many bootcamps are pumping out Java programmers instead of Python/Ruby programmers?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Well in Chicago some of the colleges are pumping out Java Devs... I guess if you are comparing a 4 year college Java dev to a 6 week bootcamp Ruby dev you have something, but that seems weird...

bane 10y ago

I usually think of scaling in 3 methods: horizontal (add more machines), vertical (get a bigger machine) and inward (improve your algorithms). The largest performance gains I've seen are most often of the inward type -- like multi-thousands of percent, just by rethinking the code or the approach. Bonus, improving inward scaling multiplies investments in horizontal and vertical scaling.