3 ms·

I'm not sure I agree. Many customers are working at a level of abstraction where this objection is not relevant. For example, if I'm building on Firebase with

I'm not sure I agree. Many customers are working at a level of abstraction where this objection is not relevant. For example, if I'm building on Firebase with Cloud Functions I'm so far abstracted from the underlying hardware that these architecture specific issues are less important. Similarly, if I'm working in Django/Python on AWS RDS, using an ARM server for my EC2 instance might be an issue ... but moving my RDS Postgres instance onto ARM might not make a difference.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
It's that way, and you're 100% right, until you hit the corner case performance bug that you can't track down and you spend hours trying to track down why some performance counter is incrementing monotonically on one platform but not on the other. Or why some highly threaded code has great throughput on your development workstation but falls down in production and it probably has something to do with differences in lock behaviour, etc.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  That’s already true today. At work I have a 12 core laptop with 32gb of RAM. In the cloud is significantly more on all fronts. We encounter all the challenges you mention and still make it work (and yes, it’s hard). That being said, I doubt anyone writing in a managed language or hitting the database will actually care. Databases that have defects on a certain architecture will have resources poured into finding and fixing the issue (although it’s entirely possible there will be cloud lockin for those fixes if they aren’t contributed back)
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  This reminds me off that story on hackernews about getting that laptop in the datacenter, because they couldn't figure out why it was slower on the server.
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
> moving my RDS Postgres instance onto ARM might not make a difference I have no specific knowledge here but I imagine the x86-64 builds are far better tested, regarding correctness. As cmrdporcupine points out, the performance of the x86-64 builds will also have been better studied. Whether it's an issue in practice, I don't know, but if you're looking to minimize risk, there are good reasons to stick with x86-64.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

It's that way, and you're 100% right, until you hit the corner case performance bug that you can't track down and you spend hours trying to track down why some performance counter is incrementing monotonically on one platform but not on the other. Or why some highly threaded code has great throughput on your development workstation but falls down in production and it probably has something to do with differences in lock behaviour, etc.

vlovich123 5y ago
That’s already true today. At work I have a 12 core laptop with 32gb of RAM. In the cloud is significantly more on all fronts. We encounter all the challenges you mention and still make it work (and yes, it’s hard). That being said, I doubt anyone writing in a managed language or hitting the database will actually care. Databases that have defects on a certain architecture will have resources poured into finding and fixing the issue (although it’s entirely possible there will be cloud lockin for those fixes if they aren’t contributed back)
MonaroVXR 5y ago
This reminds me off that story on hackernews about getting that laptop in the datacenter, because they couldn't figure out why it was slower on the server.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago

> moving my RDS Postgres instance onto ARM might not make a difference I have no specific knowledge here but I imagine the x86-64 builds are far better tested, regarding correctness. As cmrdporcupine points out, the performance of the x86-64 builds will also have been better studied. Whether it's an issue in practice, I don't know, but if you're looking to minimize risk, there are good reasons to stick with x86-64.