4 ms·

> the gap between 100M and 500M isn't that impressive This is absolutely not true. The closer you are to peak performance, the harder it is to scale, and the r

> the gap between 100M and 500M isn't that impressive This is absolutely not true. The closer you are to peak performance, the harder it is to scale, and the returns diminish heavily. At many major tech companies, there's a huge amount of effort into just 1% - 5% optimizations -- these efforts really require creative thinking and complex engineering (not just "scaling existing processes".) At the volumes these companies operate, even a 1% optimization is quite significant.

lillecarl 4y ago
Aren't you contradicting yourself? If you're on 100M users you're probably scaling vertically. So adding 5x more hardware shouldn't be a problem. But when you're at 500M all of a sudden it makes sense to optimize further since the capital saved will be the same percentage(ish) but the money is worth peoples time all of a sudden. I know that we don't care particularly about power savings in the DCs I've worked in, because they're relatively small. While bigtech will do all kinds of shenanigans to save a couple watts here and there, because it's worth it across your hundreds of thousands of servers.
- zeroxfe 4y ago
  > So adding 5x more hardware shouldn't be a problem. If only things were that simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
- beoberha 4y ago
  Seeing scale issues as purely hardware bound is incredibly naive. Even in a case like streaming, if you’re pushing more bits through the wire, it’s likely the increase in usage causing the traffic increase affects the software systems you have in place to support your service start degrading and you need to rearchitect them. Very few problems at that scale can be solved by throwing more hardware at them.
- summerlight 4y ago
  In the real world, it's rare to find a non trivial business where operational costs to its problem size scales linearly. Let's take an example of search. If t he web size grows by 10x; this not only means # of your user grows by 10x but also # of web pages to be indexed, size of the ranking model, ratio of unstructured/dynamic content formats, faster pace of content updates, reduced informational density of overall web, size of user logs, advanced SEO, (those are just a tip of iceberg, there are so many other stuffs) etc etc... Every single dimension scales and stacks up. And you need to handle all of that within a limited latency budget where you cannot really make any compromises.

lillecarl 4y ago

Aren't you contradicting yourself? If you're on 100M users you're probably scaling vertically. So adding 5x more hardware shouldn't be a problem. But when you're at 500M all of a sudden it makes sense to optimize further since the capital saved will be the same percentage(ish) but the money is worth peoples time all of a sudden. I know that we don't care particularly about power savings in the DCs I've worked in, because they're relatively small. While bigtech will do all kinds of shenanigans to save a couple watts here and there, because it's worth it across your hundreds of thousands of servers.

zeroxfe 4y ago
> So adding 5x more hardware shouldn't be a problem. If only things were that simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
beoberha 4y ago
Seeing scale issues as purely hardware bound is incredibly naive. Even in a case like streaming, if you’re pushing more bits through the wire, it’s likely the increase in usage causing the traffic increase affects the software systems you have in place to support your service start degrading and you need to rearchitect them. Very few problems at that scale can be solved by throwing more hardware at them.
summerlight 4y ago
In the real world, it's rare to find a non trivial business where operational costs to its problem size scales linearly. Let's take an example of search. If t he web size grows by 10x; this not only means # of your user grows by 10x but also # of web pages to be indexed, size of the ranking model, ratio of unstructured/dynamic content formats, faster pace of content updates, reduced informational density of overall web, size of user logs, advanced SEO, (those are just a tip of iceberg, there are so many other stuffs) etc etc... Every single dimension scales and stacks up. And you need to handle all of that within a limited latency budget where you cannot really make any compromises.