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She specifically says to go with slow disk I/O (not in-memory indices) because the most important thing is not to have to deal with failing servers. This was w
by ljlolel 16y ago
She specifically says to go with slow disk I/O (not in-memory indices) because the most important thing is not to have to deal with failing servers.
This was written in 2004, and the equivalent statement would be that you should not deal with maintaining physical servers but have the cloud handle it so you can focus on algorithms/parallelism/runtime.
Also, unrelated to what you wrote, this is 2004, and statements like "people search for words not phrases" are frankly no longer true. Average query length is way up (even before google suggest and instant) and people have been searching for phrases more and more since 2004.
She's completely right, but if she were to rewrite this today, in 2010, it would be an even longer article. A single-word search engine would not return acceptable results.
- iamelgringo 16y agore: Cloud Srorage vs Garage data center Elastic Block is NAS . This is why Elastic Block storage is two to three orders of magnitude slower than SSD attached to a server in your garage. 1 EC2 compute unit is analagous to a 1.6 Ghz 2005 Opteron, or performance wise it's similar to a fast Atom processor. I can build a 4 core server with 8 Gigs of RAM and 120GB of SSD and 2 TB of spinning disk for around $600. SSD latencies are low enough that they can be thought of as slow local memory. So, for the cost of a 3 to 4 months of medium / large instance EC2 instances, you can have roughly 8 times the processing power and 2 orders of magnitude more local memory/SSD. By setting up a couple of cheap servers in my garage, I can get as much processing power as 20 to 30 EC2 instances. That means I can spend a lot more time worrying about coding and less worrying about SysOps. re: single word search You are absolutely right. As I said, our search is very much in alpha right now, and I really haven't spent much time at all on it.