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> On servers, idling CPUs is the norm. The competition for "least true statement on HN" is always fierce, but you've just submitted a contender. All the people
by notacoward 8y ago
> On servers, idling CPUs is the norm.
The competition for "least true statement on HN" is always fierce, but you've just submitted a contender. All the people who have lots of servers work really hard to coalesce workloads and drive up utilization. I know because that's what I do, and it's what everyone around me does. It's why the cloud you use is cost-effective. The machines that are mostly idle are clients, not servers.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoWhen do you start sending alerts? 10%, 50%, or 90% CPU? For us we like our cheap T2s. We have multiple for redundancy; not for performance reasons. All the places I've been tended to over provision servers to be able to deal with spikes in usage. 90% is typically bad news.
- notacoward 8y agoWhatever your alert threshold is, that still defines a fixed amount of work per machine and thus how many machines you need to satisfy a given workload. If you need 100 machines to stay below your alert threshold, and you make a 1% improvement in efficiency, you now need 99 machines to stay below that same threshold. Whatever it is. For just about any load distribution that's not already problematic (e.g. if all of the load gets concentrated on one machine you're screwed no matter what). I work all day every day on dozens of clusters much bigger than that, and so do a lot of other people. For us, spending half a year to get a 1% improvement is an opportunity big enough to get excited about.