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Nobody’s getting “the last .1% that can ever be gotten”, so it’s a moot point. Google and Facebook are still growing. There’s always room for more improvements.
by traek 8y ago
Nobody’s getting “the last .1% that can ever be gotten”, so it’s a moot point. Google and Facebook are still growing. There’s always room for more improvements.
- hinkley 8y agoAnd they are both aggressively using horizontal scalability. What’s your point?
- pas 8y agoThat these kind of micro optimizations are worth it. They reduce bulk and tail latency, and probably make the system more load-bearing. Of course, since now the system depends on a more "lucky" allocation of resources, it has more failure cases, thus a tighter operational envelope.
- hinkley 8y agoYou keep implying that Facebook and Google are making these micro-optimizations with no support. I don't think you can support them, which means your premise is flawed and your conclusions are wrong. They have ridiculous numbers of servers. Rather than fiddling to reduce server count, they're improving their ability to scale out. It's cheaper and it's repeatable. Doing crazy things like building custom hardware and power distribution buses (Facebook) to reduce heat in the data centers.
- pas 8y agoGoogle does a lot of micro-optimizations. There are services where latency is important, they launch multiple requests to different replicas but to optimize this when one of the replicas is serving the response it sends a request cancel to the other one. Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling is both very important. Both G and FB pours many engineering hours into maximizing per server "ROI". Just think about how much they work on scheduling work/tasks so they can do more with the same number of servers.