I appreciate the feedback. These architecture choices are something that I think about a lot, but for now I'm satisfied that we chose the right path based on ou

I appreciate the feedback. These architecture choices are something that I think about a lot, but for now I'm satisfied that we chose the right path based on our requirements at the time. It is annoying that Apple has let the current Mac Pro rot on the vine to a large extent. This is something that certainly gives me pause and will be factored in to the future direction of our rendering pipeline. There may not be much of a future for image rendering on Macs at imgix, but we have to factor in all the variables when deciding on our future roadmap. The difference between a v2 and v3 CPU definitely isn't double performance, by the way. An E5-2697v2 (the top-of-line Mac Pro CPU) is a 970 on SPECintrate, and an E5-2697v3 is a 1240 on SPECintrate (we track other measurements, but that's the quickest comparison I found). So it's better for sure, but it's also 15W higher draw and has 2 more cores to help grow those numbers. Per-core performance on SPECint is only 60 vs 64. That said, in a perfect world I would love to use v3 or v4 Xeons on our image rendering hosts. It just wouldn't be a night-and-day kind of difference that's worth throwing our existing pipeline out over. Have to be careful not to toss the baby with the bathwater here. The real performance issue for us this time around was adding machines to overcome certain scalability constraints, and optimizing certain code paths that were prohibitively expensive.