4 ms·

Flagging this as it's an absurdly shallow article apparently combining about 10 minutes of "research" after hearing something on twitter with conflating typical

by xoa 7y ago

Flagging this as it's an absurdly shallow article apparently combining about 10 minutes of "research" after hearing something on twitter with conflating typical end user use-cases and an entire technology. The "tuning" and "oh noes my VMs this is surely a new problem nobody doing virtualization has ever thought of" section is too absurd to even bother with. But for the security aspect it's worth pointing out that in many, if not most [1], true performance critical environments all code being run is trusted. The system or cluster is dedicated to being given one specific job after another to crunch on, exclusively by authorized users in authenticated ways and outputting exclusively to a controlled channel going off-system. Even if it ever should have a problem, it would merely result in possibly some corruption of data in flight and some downtime as the whole thing was re-imaged, but nothing that would be remotely worse a 15-50% drop in performance (!). For roots sake. ---- 1: where "most" means "in the raw amount of hardware $$$ spent".

zamadatix 7y ago
There aren't really many "performance critical" multithreaded environments in the world. For the most part you either have something that doesn't scale and needs a really fast thread or you have a cost equation about how many servers you need to buy/maintain. The main exception that comes to mind are extremely large databases that heavily resist horizontal scaling due to poor design (of either software or database). I'd argue most large compute by total $ is actually shared at the host level i.e. public/private cloud or user devices. Basically the only things that aren't are dedicated clusters for specific applications and a few hundred supercomputers while AWS alone has over 100x as many cores as the largest supercomputer. Also I don't think there is a high horse to be on about an article not targeting the audience of the largest exacompute scale clusters, not everyone/everything at HN need be at the forefront of the field to avoid being flagged.
- chaps 7y ago
  Er, there aren't many performance critical multithreaded environments? Latency sensitive systems disagree, and those are all over the place.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Can you give examples of something that scales via threading but requires in a single thread the function takes 500 microseconds instead of 600 microseconds to compute that actually contradicts that "most" systems aren't this way?
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      Most professionnal audio software is like that - you can have e.g. a thread per track to make it simple but you also have to ensure that each execution cycle does not take more than 1 millisecond else you get audio glitches. And there is no limit to how hard you have to improve - this is a central factor for people buying your software (see dawbench) and artists really really don't like limits - they will always try to add more effects, etc etc on each track.
      - zamadatix 7y ago
        Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups a disruptor of the vast majority of systems. Put all of these niche compute heavy multithreaded real time use cases and you have <1% the CPU market. I.e. my claim was "There aren't really many 'performance critical' multithreaded environments in the world." not that there aren't any.
        jcelerier 7y ago
        > Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups a disruptor of the vast majority of systems. I mean, there's still a few hundred thousand people registered on DAW-related forums so certainly a fair bit more are using those. That is more than a dozen european countries. Sure, it's not angry birds but I do not think that it is relevant to cater to the lowest common denominator of software.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  There are lots of performance-critical environments out there in the embedded world... why else would VxWorks be so popular?
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Unless you're implying there are a lot of embedded machines running VxWorks on overclocked i9 9900K's because they needed the single core throughput I think we are talking about completely different concepts.

by xoa 7y ago

zamadatix 7y ago

There aren't really many "performance critical" multithreaded environments in the world. For the most part you either have something that doesn't scale and needs a really fast thread or you have a cost equation about how many servers you need to buy/maintain. The main exception that comes to mind are extremely large databases that heavily resist horizontal scaling due to poor design (of either software or database). I'd argue most large compute by total $ is actually shared at the host level i.e. public/private cloud or user devices. Basically the only things that aren't are dedicated clusters for specific applications and a few hundred supercomputers while AWS alone has over 100x as many cores as the largest supercomputer. Also I don't think there is a high horse to be on about an article not targeting the audience of the largest exacompute scale clusters, not everyone/everything at HN need be at the forefront of the field to avoid being flagged.

chaps 7y ago
Er, there aren't many performance critical multithreaded environments? Latency sensitive systems disagree, and those are all over the place.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Can you give examples of something that scales via threading but requires in a single thread the function takes 500 microseconds instead of 600 microseconds to compute that actually contradicts that "most" systems aren't this way?
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    Most professionnal audio software is like that - you can have e.g. a thread per track to make it simple but you also have to ensure that each execution cycle does not take more than 1 millisecond else you get audio glitches. And there is no limit to how hard you have to improve - this is a central factor for people buying your software (see dawbench) and artists really really don't like limits - they will always try to add more effects, etc etc on each track.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups a disruptor of the vast majority of systems. Put all of these niche compute heavy multithreaded real time use cases and you have <1% the CPU market. I.e. my claim was "There aren't really many 'performance critical' multithreaded environments in the world." not that there aren't any.
      - jcelerier 7y ago
        > Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups a disruptor of the vast majority of systems. I mean, there's still a few hundred thousand people registered on DAW-related forums so certainly a fair bit more are using those. That is more than a dozen european countries. Sure, it's not angry birds but I do not think that it is relevant to cater to the lowest common denominator of software.
tomc1985 7y ago
There are lots of performance-critical environments out there in the embedded world... why else would VxWorks be so popular?
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Unless you're implying there are a lot of embedded machines running VxWorks on overclocked i9 9900K's because they needed the single core throughput I think we are talking about completely different concepts.