3 ms·

It's not "madness." It depends on how much the servers cost, and how many users you have (or could have with a 10% improvement in UX).

hinkley 5y ago
If a 10% improvement comes from 3x the servers you are moments away from hitting the wall with Amdahl's Law. If you're hoping that 10% will increase your traffic, you aren't just going to hit that wall, you are actually driving the truck into it. That is madness. Expensive, company-ending, last-gasp madness. It doesn't 'depend'. It's physics. "Explaining Thermodynamics and Information Theory to people praying for a miracle" is immediately after "off by one errors" on the Hardest Things list.
- dfabulich 5y ago
  Sure, there's a limit on how many servers are worth purchasing. 3x servers might get us a 10% UX improvement, but that doesn't mean that 9x servers would yield a 20% improvement. We should stop buying servers when it stops being cost effective. That may or may not be 3x the number of servers we have now. It could be we're already over provisioned, or that you should only buy 2x, or maybe you can afford 5x, or 9x, and the number may change over time as the costs of maintenance and the number/value of your users rises and falls.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > If a 10% improvement comes from 3x the servers you are moments away from hitting the wall with Amdahl's Law If your bloated SPA loads tens of megabytes of JS and makes fans spin on all your users' computers, ... will you think about Amdahl's law, or is it fine then?
- saurik 5y ago
  A product that is 10% better to use is a lot better... people routinely put tons of effort into much smaller amounts of benefit, as benefit is difficult to pull off; and the reality is that servers probably aren't costing the majority of your revenue.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  If you have 1,000 customers paying $10 per month and you’re spending $100 a month on servers, it might easily be worth the extra $200 per month to improve performance by 10%.

hinkley 5y ago

If a 10% improvement comes from 3x the servers you are moments away from hitting the wall with Amdahl's Law. If you're hoping that 10% will increase your traffic, you aren't just going to hit that wall, you are actually driving the truck into it. That is madness. Expensive, company-ending, last-gasp madness. It doesn't 'depend'. It's physics. "Explaining Thermodynamics and Information Theory to people praying for a miracle" is immediately after "off by one errors" on the Hardest Things list.

dfabulich 5y ago
Sure, there's a limit on how many servers are worth purchasing. 3x servers might get us a 10% UX improvement, but that doesn't mean that 9x servers would yield a 20% improvement. We should stop buying servers when it stops being cost effective. That may or may not be 3x the number of servers we have now. It could be we're already over provisioned, or that you should only buy 2x, or maybe you can afford 5x, or 9x, and the number may change over time as the costs of maintenance and the number/value of your users rises and falls.
dmitriid 5y ago
> If a 10% improvement comes from 3x the servers you are moments away from hitting the wall with Amdahl's Law If your bloated SPA loads tens of megabytes of JS and makes fans spin on all your users' computers, ... will you think about Amdahl's law, or is it fine then?
saurik 5y ago
A product that is 10% better to use is a lot better... people routinely put tons of effort into much smaller amounts of benefit, as benefit is difficult to pull off; and the reality is that servers probably aren't costing the majority of your revenue.
tshaddox 5y ago
If you have 1,000 customers paying $10 per month and you’re spending $100 a month on servers, it might easily be worth the extra $200 per month to improve performance by 10%.