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I'm the author of the original article. A typical server costs $1500 (DELL, HP) nowadays, but I've seen java apps commonly take up a whole rack of servers, not

by scumola 17y ago

I'm the author of the original article. A typical server costs $1500 (DELL, HP) nowadays, but I've seen java apps commonly take up a whole rack of servers, not just one. This is a base cost of $30k and > $1500/mo for rackspace, A/C, power, bandwidth and maintenance. That's one-half of an FTE up-front and one FTE's salary reoccurring. I hear from java developers, "I'll need 6x 3Ghz, quad-core, dual-cpu machines for this (pretty simple) app I'm writing". Are you f-ing kidding me? Do you know what you could do with that kind of hardware if you wrote it in a different language? Your app is basically a glorified web server that does one thing that apache doesn't do out of the box. It sickens me to see this kind of waste because of the programmer's language choice.

moe 17y ago
That's one-half of an FTE up-front and one FTE's salary reoccurring. Only if your FTEs are very cheap. Most I know wouldn't get out of bed for less than $50k+. But even if it was half a man-year upfront and one recurring - that's still a no-brainer (remember we're talking an entire rack here, which goes quite a way for most apps). If that rack enables your 5 programmers to work only 10% faster (completely theoretical ofcourse, but for the sake of the argument...) then it has already more than paid for itself. Your argument is quite old nowadays (I remember the heated efficiency debates in the 90s) and has long been decided. Hardware is so cheap now that in most cases it really is demonstrably more cost effective to throw hardware at certain problems.
- prodigal_erik 17y ago
  It depends on the constants. For example, we rewrote our critical path app server in Java, and now it can handle 6x the load compared to our predecessors' PHP version. Twitter was getting crushed by Ruby performance, so they went to Scala on the JVM. These were clearly worth doing. But using C would only net a few more percent in performance and at best 50% less memory required, at a huge stability risk.
codahale 17y ago
I've seen java apps commonly take up a whole rack of servers, not just one Ok, and I've seen Java apps not do that. Argument by anecdote is bankrupt.

by scumola 17y ago

moe 17y ago

That's one-half of an FTE up-front and one FTE's salary reoccurring. Only if your FTEs are very cheap. Most I know wouldn't get out of bed for less than $50k+. But even if it was half a man-year upfront and one recurring - that's still a no-brainer (remember we're talking an entire rack here, which goes quite a way for most apps). If that rack enables your 5 programmers to work only 10% faster (completely theoretical ofcourse, but for the sake of the argument...) then it has already more than paid for itself. Your argument is quite old nowadays (I remember the heated efficiency debates in the 90s) and has long been decided. Hardware is so cheap now that in most cases it really is demonstrably more cost effective to throw hardware at certain problems.

prodigal_erik 17y ago
It depends on the constants. For example, we rewrote our critical path app server in Java, and now it can handle 6x the load compared to our predecessors' PHP version. Twitter was getting crushed by Ruby performance, so they went to Scala on the JVM. These were clearly worth doing. But using C would only net a few more percent in performance and at best 50% less memory required, at a huge stability risk.

codahale 17y ago

I've seen java apps commonly take up a whole rack of servers, not just one Ok, and I've seen Java apps not do that. Argument by anecdote is bankrupt.