5 ms·

Dunno, not sure I buy it. From a software devel point of view it's "just" linux. The full ecosystem is there, clang/gcc, ruby, perl, python, javascript, apach

by sliken 9y ago

Dunno, not sure I buy it. From a software devel point of view it's "just" linux. The full ecosystem is there, clang/gcc, ruby, perl, python, javascript, apache, mysql, nginx, postgres, etc. About the only thing I can think of that might be different is if you are using cycle counters for profiling things, but it's rare to need to get to that level these days. I think the real problem is everyone likes to target the top of the Intel systems that sell in very low quantities. Sure I'm sure HFT folks can make huge $$$ trading just a bit faster. But the bulk of Intel server sales are the low/mid range. Things like the E5-2620/E5-2630 that costs $300-$500 per CPU and has nice capable servers starting around $2k. Sure $65k power system with 4 Voltas sounds great. But few will drop over $50k on a server without having a few cheaper servers in production for awhile. Beating the collective performance of 10 $5k servers is also going to be tough. Amusingly Intel fails that same test, rarely are the top chips the best price/performance unless the cheaper servers trigger needing to buy a new building. Not to mention if IBM starts getting traction you can bet those $5k per CPU intel chips will start getting discounts rather quickly.

klodolph 9y ago
There’s a certain amount of laziness that prompts people to get bigger servers. I’ve been at a few companies where the solution to performance issues (as in, the thing that makes us money isn’t keeping up with customers and therefore we can’t grow our business) is to make the server bigger. Switching to a distributed system is sometimes too far off the radar and costs precious engineering time. So the story is “just buy a bigger and faster computer, we’ll figure out how to shard this later.” The company drops more cash on IBM or whatever, and the engineers focus on features that close sales deals. And then there are the larger companies which buy some expensive IBM servers and port their software in order to squeeze discounts out of Intel.
- mseebach 9y ago
  It's a difficult balance to get right. A $2k server as the GP describes costs less than a week of a fully loaded engineer. If those $2k buys you another X time (for any X >> week) of the application working, then it's not at all obvious that it's the lazy or otherwise wrong step to take. (Lots of handwaving in the above, main takeaway is that it's the expected and rational path in a world where engineers are expensive and scarce and servers are cheap)
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    In this position. Inherited a complete mess of a system (response time measured in minutes) running on an Xeon E3 w/8GB of RAM and 500GB of spinny rust. It's going to take months if not years to unscrew some of the mess so I suggested to the boss the quickest way of improving it was to upgrade the server so we ordered a Xeon E5 dual processor system with 32GB of DDR4 and 1TB DC grade SSD. Once I've ported the system from PHP5 to 7 on that and moved to a recent MySQL version we'll get a very nice perf improvement for basically free and then I can refactor the mess and at the end we'll have a better optimised system running on much better hardware. Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't.
    - dingaling 9y ago
      > Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't. Sadly it's not always that simple. People's time, salaries, falls into the base expenditure. Hardware acquisition is a discretionary cost, which is usually squeezed particularly in a cost-centre like IT support. Or the existing hardware is under a multi-year lease from a vendor like Dell or HP and has to be paid-for whether it's obsolete or not. Where I've worked ( big non-IT-orientated companies ) it's more typical to throw a couple of people onto a project to debug and refactor an application than buy better hardware. Or even worse, implement a new project on existing shared hardware.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        Yes that can happen if people are already on staff and can be assigned to such an effort. But if the choice is spend $50K on new hardware, vs. hire three new devs to rewrite/optimize the software, the decision is easy.
        noir_lord 9y ago
        Yep, there is only me and company doesn't want to hire a new dev so hardware is the cheapest way to speed things up now and it'll still be there when we are finished.
      - 9y ago

by sliken 9y ago

klodolph 9y ago

There’s a certain amount of laziness that prompts people to get bigger servers. I’ve been at a few companies where the solution to performance issues (as in, the thing that makes us money isn’t keeping up with customers and therefore we can’t grow our business) is to make the server bigger. Switching to a distributed system is sometimes too far off the radar and costs precious engineering time. So the story is “just buy a bigger and faster computer, we’ll figure out how to shard this later.” The company drops more cash on IBM or whatever, and the engineers focus on features that close sales deals. And then there are the larger companies which buy some expensive IBM servers and port their software in order to squeeze discounts out of Intel.

mseebach 9y ago
It's a difficult balance to get right. A $2k server as the GP describes costs less than a week of a fully loaded engineer. If those $2k buys you another X time (for any X >> week) of the application working, then it's not at all obvious that it's the lazy or otherwise wrong step to take. (Lots of handwaving in the above, main takeaway is that it's the expected and rational path in a world where engineers are expensive and scarce and servers are cheap)
- noir_lord 9y ago
  In this position. Inherited a complete mess of a system (response time measured in minutes) running on an Xeon E3 w/8GB of RAM and 500GB of spinny rust. It's going to take months if not years to unscrew some of the mess so I suggested to the boss the quickest way of improving it was to upgrade the server so we ordered a Xeon E5 dual processor system with 32GB of DDR4 and 1TB DC grade SSD. Once I've ported the system from PHP5 to 7 on that and moved to a recent MySQL version we'll get a very nice perf improvement for basically free and then I can refactor the mess and at the end we'll have a better optimised system running on much better hardware. Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    > Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't. Sadly it's not always that simple. People's time, salaries, falls into the base expenditure. Hardware acquisition is a discretionary cost, which is usually squeezed particularly in a cost-centre like IT support. Or the existing hardware is under a multi-year lease from a vendor like Dell or HP and has to be paid-for whether it's obsolete or not. Where I've worked ( big non-IT-orientated companies ) it's more typical to throw a couple of people onto a project to debug and refactor an application than buy better hardware. Or even worse, implement a new project on existing shared hardware.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Yes that can happen if people are already on staff and can be assigned to such an effort. But if the choice is spend $50K on new hardware, vs. hire three new devs to rewrite/optimize the software, the decision is easy.
      - noir_lord 9y ago
        Yep, there is only me and company doesn't want to hire a new dev so hardware is the cheapest way to speed things up now and it'll still be there when we are finished.
    - 9y ago