4 ms·

> So maybe 12 months worth of a senior engineer's time. In America. When the salaries are 2/3 times lower, people spend more time to use less hardware.

• toast0 5y ago
  Sharding does take more time, but it doesn't save that much in hardware costs. Maybe you can save money with two 4TB ram servers vs one 8TB ram server, because the highest density ram tends to cost more per byte, but you also had to buy a whole second system. And that second system has follow on costs, now you're using more power, and twice the switch ports, etc. There's also a price breakpoint for single socket vs dual socket. Or four vs two, if you really want to spend money. My feeling is currently, single socket Epyc looks nice if you don't use a ton of ram, but dual socket is still decently affordable if you need more cores or more ram and probably for Intel sevees; quad socket adds a lot of expense and probably isn't worth it. Of course, if time is cheap and hardware isn't, you can spend more time on reducing data size, profiling to find optimizations, etc.
  • Zababa 5y ago
    Fair points, I'm just trying to push back a bit against "optimizing anything is useless since the main cost is engineering and not hardware", since this situation depends on the local salaries and in low-inome countries the opposite can be true.