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The critical factor is scale. Thousands of servers replaced with hundreds by more efficient code can be worthwhile.
by bagels 4y ago
The critical factor is scale. Thousands of servers replaced with hundreds by more efficient code can be worthwhile.
- TimPC 4y agoThis means working at companies with massive scale can be far better because you get to make code performant and optimize things rather than just focus on getting features out the door.
- jbverschoor 4y agoYup. It should, and in general it is.. Look at operating systems, compared to <insert random app>. Somehow programmers care about the big O notation, but not when it's about other people's time.
- curtainsforus 4y agoThe operating systems that get fatter and slower every year?
- djmips 4y agoThat's not the only factor. Sometimes it's weight or power or a fixed system like embedded, console or a particular product that's not easily upgradable.
- jcalabro 4y agoYeah for sure. One thing I think about often is if you're writing a compiler and it's slow (say it takes 10s per build), if you have 1000's of engineers running it 100x per day, that starts to add up quick. If you could get it down to 1 second, then you'd save a lot of actual engineer time, just not your own. Scale is key here, but fast software is always a much better user experience than slow stuff as well. With the compiler example, if it takes 1s as opposed to 1h, then users can iterate much more quickly and get a lot of flexibility.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trashtester 4y agoYou don't need thousands of servers to make it worthwhile. If you have code that runs constantly on 11 servers (possibly in k8s) that each cost $1k/month in AWS, and you spend a few weaks optimizing it down to needing 1 server, those weeks just generated the equivalent of a YEARLY $120k revenue stream. If you require an ROI of 5 years, no interest included, you just created $600k in value over a few weeks.