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In general, our industry lacks a sense of "mechanical sympathy"[0]. Whether it's understanding what knobs are tunable in an operating system or using streams fo
by rufius 4y ago
In general, our industry lacks a sense of "mechanical sympathy"[0]. Whether it's understanding what knobs are tunable in an operating system or using streams for reading data to keep a consistent memory profile, we often don't dig deep. Ditto for folks understanding database systems.
I think in very big systems, you see folks dig deep, but it's not encouraged with smaller systems. I think there's a lot of inefficiently run services - not from a price perspective but from a "what could I really get out of 3 compute nodes and a well designed database schema."
[0]: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
- bravetraveler 4y agoI appreciate you introducing me to this concept -- it's something I've thought a lot about, but could never verbalize
- rufius 4y agoI think about it a lot. A portion of my job has been either optimizing big systems or building very minimally invasive software that has to process a lot of data. It’s akin to tuning a sports car. You can slap a big engine in a car, but the difference of a few seconds off of a lap is thousands of man-hours in optimization and tuning.