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> A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over
by xyzzyz 5y ago
> A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. What on Earth is Ubuntu doing that results in 30% higher CPU time!?
Also, think about it this way: imagine if you started out with Ubuntu. You’d then likely never notice that your system is 30% slower than it needs be.
Now, take it further: the system from which you moved to Ubuntu most likely has not been the most efficient it could get either, and it was also likely that random crap was sapping significant amount of performance.
And finally, extend this from Cassandra and Ubuntu to everything else. Welcome to 2021, where machines are faster than ever, but things feel as slow as they have always been.
- bostonsre 5y agoYea, this stuff is complicated. It only starts making sense to get someone like Brendan on your pay roll as your company scales and your aws bill gets larger and larger. To most small companies, that additional 30% cpu utilization is negligible and not worth the time to investigate but for someone like Netflix, having a baller like him on your team can save you millions of dollars in compute costs. But there is still hope for us mere mortals to understand how systems work better and make them faster. His systems performance book is absolutely ridiculous. It is pretty dense and I've been through chapters several times without fully grasping everything, but it is extremely pragmatic with how it dives into various topics and it is by far the best computer science book I've read.