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If I scale up to saturate the database CPU...by doing data retrieval? Setting aside my skepticism about saturating the CPU with mere data retrieval, how is that
by dventimi 4y ago
If I scale up to saturate the database CPU...by doing data retrieval? Setting aside my skepticism about saturating the CPU with mere data retrieval, how is that solved by moving the data to another host's CPU, when moving the data involves the very data retrieval that's saturating the database's CPU?
- yunwal 4y agoIf you mix in compute-heavy calculations (like stochastic gradient descent) in with your pure data-retrieval, yes you'll saturate the database's CPU, and you won't have a reasonable way to scale it. If you do it on a host that's not a database, then you can horizontally scale it. There's a reason stateless apps are the default.
- dventimi 4y agoOk so if I'm not mixing in compute heavy workloads like the stochastic gradient descent described in the article, then it's less likely I'll saturate the CPU. Perhaps that won't happen at all and then I won't have to scale horizontally. On the other hand if I'm doing stochastic gradient descent that's saturating the CPU then there's a good chance I'm doing offline training of an ML model. In that case my latency tolerances are probably much much higher. In other words, I can also avoid scaling horizontally provided I can live with longer training times. That might be a worthwhile trade-off to me given the added complexity of horizontal scaling. Good to know!