4 ms·

What hardware would you want, and how much would it cost?

• marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Interesting question. If I wanted to say grow the index 10-fold and aim for a billion documents indexed (~2.5bn crawled), I'd need: * More crawlers. This is mostly a network limitation. Disk requirement would be about 50 Tb in total of literally any hard drive, split along the crawlers. * A dedicated number crunching machine for index construction and processing. Basically needs to be all cores and all RAM. * A dedicated SQL server. Doesn't have to be super big or fast, but right now it's contending with the index for RAM. * Either a bigger index server, or a few machines for a sharded index. I'd basically need 40 Tb worth of Enterpise SSD and 1 Tb total of RAM. The problem space is very nice in that almost everything is either embarrassingly parallel along some axis or another or O(n)-O(n log n) so adding more hardware pays off well. This is clearly too much hardware to run out of my apartment, even if the fuses held up the noise and heat would be intolerable, so likely some form of colocation hosting as well. I dunno what it would land on. Probably a one-off cost of about $50k-$100k, depending the degree of redundancy. There's definitely stuff that could be done for less as well. Like right now the entire operation runs out of a single machine, and it's causing me to have to bring the service down for days at a time when I'm switching to a new index.
  • cvwright 3y ago
    Cool, thanks. I will pass this along to some people who might be able to help.