3 ms·

If you assume some upper bound of checks per tick/checker (10k in the example), then they're performing that same, large amount of work at a regular interval. T

by hansvm 4y ago

If you assume some upper bound of checks per tick/checker (10k in the example), then they're performing that same, large amount of work at a regular interval. The author lightly addressed that when talking about O(1) vs O(C) work. The problem being addressed is that if work increases over time, when shit hits the fan, ..., then you're prone to running into cliffs or modes of operation, where the system transitions from behaving perfectly to failing completely. If you don't push the limits regularly then you're unlikely to know what those limits might be. The solution here is to do extra work (you're definitely right, 10k checks is more than 10), but in such a way that you're constantly exercising that limit and have no variance in the work the system does. Running a short period of time in that configuration gives you confidence that your bounds are reasonable and protects the rest of the system from an explosion of extra work caused by retries and whatnot.

vlovich123 4y ago
It's honestly a bit contradictory. It's budgeting the system to always run at the worst possible case and then it says: > At the same time, there are cases where the constant work pattern doesn’t fit quite as well. If you’re running a large website that requires 100 web servers at peak, you could choose to always run 100 web servers. This certainly reduces a source of variance in the system, and is in the spirit of the constant work design pattern, but it’s also wasteful. For web servers, scaling elastically can be a better fit because the savings are large. It’s not unusual to require half as many web servers off peak time as during the peak. Because that scaling happens day in and day out, the overall system can still experience the dynamism regularly enough to shake out problems. The savings can be enjoyed by the customer and the planet. Well, then why not just do a stress test on these things regularly rather than constantly running it at worst case? For example, once every few hours generate the 10k items but otherwise leave the system running normally. Same effect without running it always in "worst case" mode.
- hansvm 4y ago
  It's not really contradictory; it just says that this pattern has benefits and sometimes they're not worth the cost. To your other point, that was my first thought as well. The main counterargument that comes to mind is that if all your systems (and those they're interfacing with which you don't control) aren't subject to the whole load at once (assuming you have more than one service running and thus care about the effects of interactions) or if there's some nondeterminism or emergent properties at play (so that you're not just looking at monotonic components combining together) then the bimodality of that system is still undesirable; perhaps it hits a nice point in the cost/benefit curve though.

by hansvm 4y ago

vlovich123 4y ago

It's honestly a bit contradictory. It's budgeting the system to always run at the worst possible case and then it says: > At the same time, there are cases where the constant work pattern doesn’t fit quite as well. If you’re running a large website that requires 100 web servers at peak, you could choose to always run 100 web servers. This certainly reduces a source of variance in the system, and is in the spirit of the constant work design pattern, but it’s also wasteful. For web servers, scaling elastically can be a better fit because the savings are large. It’s not unusual to require half as many web servers off peak time as during the peak. Because that scaling happens day in and day out, the overall system can still experience the dynamism regularly enough to shake out problems. The savings can be enjoyed by the customer and the planet. Well, then why not just do a stress test on these things regularly rather than constantly running it at worst case? For example, once every few hours generate the 10k items but otherwise leave the system running normally. Same effect without running it always in "worst case" mode.

hansvm 4y ago
It's not really contradictory; it just says that this pattern has benefits and sometimes they're not worth the cost. To your other point, that was my first thought as well. The main counterargument that comes to mind is that if all your systems (and those they're interfacing with which you don't control) aren't subject to the whole load at once (assuming you have more than one service running and thus care about the effects of interactions) or if there's some nondeterminism or emergent properties at play (so that you're not just looking at monotonic components combining together) then the bimodality of that system is still undesirable; perhaps it hits a nice point in the cost/benefit curve though.