4 ms·

Can anyone comment on when at what level of scale this kind of issue might arise? It seems like it would be fairly costly to implement and test, is it safe to a

Can anyone comment on when at what level of scale this kind of issue might arise? It seems like it would be fairly costly to implement and test, is it safe to assume that when you attempt this it is either infeasible or too costly to continue to scale to be able to service the peak load? If you were running on bare-metal and simply could not add more instances/databases/caches/etc fast enough I can understand that you might be able to deploy a software solution like this faster than increasing capacity. I could also understand being capped by the cost of continuing to scale but I can't imagine putting the development effort into this kind of solution unless there were no other options? Would these kind of techniques ever be a worthwhile exercise to a (early) startup or a small company that is hosting in the cloud or is it a last resort after you have already gotten quite large?

stuckagain 10y ago
I think your question is really excellent. If you don't feel pressure to eek out the very last drop of marginal utilization, load shedding might not be for you. It may be quite a bit easier to just add 5% more CPU or sandbag your open-loop capacity plan.
- okreallywtf 10y ago
  Thanks, its an interesting topic but as I read it I started to think about someone coming along with a startup or a side project actually thinking this is something they would want to put effort into prematurely rather than putting more effort into more (cost and time) productive optimizations or the product itself. I'm definitely going to store the techniques away in my mental toolbox for later though and hope I get an opportunity to say "Procrustean load shedding" in a standup sometime.
greenleafjacob 10y ago
Yes this is mostly for when your capacity is fixed, but doesn't necessarily mean it has to be large scale. For example an embedded system must reject excess work since it has limited but small capacity.
- okreallywtf 10y ago
  Great point, I wasn't thinking about embedded systems.

stuckagain 10y ago

I think your question is really excellent. If you don't feel pressure to eek out the very last drop of marginal utilization, load shedding might not be for you. It may be quite a bit easier to just add 5% more CPU or sandbag your open-loop capacity plan.

okreallywtf 10y ago
Thanks, its an interesting topic but as I read it I started to think about someone coming along with a startup or a side project actually thinking this is something they would want to put effort into prematurely rather than putting more effort into more (cost and time) productive optimizations or the product itself. I'm definitely going to store the techniques away in my mental toolbox for later though and hope I get an opportunity to say "Procrustean load shedding" in a standup sometime.

greenleafjacob 10y ago

Yes this is mostly for when your capacity is fixed, but doesn't necessarily mean it has to be large scale. For example an embedded system must reject excess work since it has limited but small capacity.

okreallywtf 10y ago
Great point, I wasn't thinking about embedded systems.