4 ms·
Serving the web seems to split between a) IO-bound problems and b) databases. It is certainly not embarassingly parallel in the "would benefit from GPUs" sense.
by dagss 10y ago
Serving the web seems to split between a) IO-bound problems and b) databases. It is certainly not embarassingly parallel in the "would benefit from GPUs" sense.
Those thousands of threads just sit there waiting for the database to respond a lot of the time. The database is busy trying to keep things synchronized across nodes. It is just that the hard stuff is pushed down to the database layer.
- SwellJoe 10y agoBoth can be true. Database development, both the way they're built and the way people use them, has been focused on scaling across machines and storage for most of the history of the web; it's possible it'll never quite catch up with CPU, but it will continue to move that way. I don't know what the next evolution of databases looks like (I'm definitely not a database expert), but if Google and facebook and Amazon and Microsoft and many others need it to scale beyond what is currently possible to keep up with CPU parallelization, they'll figure out how to make it scale.
- k_lander 10y agoaren't databases in turn being held back by the hardware limitations like IO bandwidth?