4 ms·

"Please do not require racing slicks for your formula one cars, some of us are still racing with wooden wagon wheels and can't afford to upgrade to Bridgestone

"Please do not require racing slicks for your formula one cars, some of us are still racing with wooden wagon wheels and can't afford to upgrade to Bridgestone rubber tyres." The listed excuses are all in the category: "We've been doing things wrong, sometimes for a decade or more, please don't make us change our erroneous ways!" First of all, if anyone is using any kind of cloud hosting, then there is no excuse. Zero. None. All public clouds allow the choice of CPUs with instruction sets up to and including AVX-512. It's a dropdown menu. Go look at the options it has. You didn't, did you? You deployed your high performance data warehouse cluster (Clickhouse) with the default VM SKU, didn't you? Admit it. That's a pile of money you'd rather burning than admit that you are too lazy to even glance at the menu options when creating a $50K/month VM cluster.[1] The next one is the VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), which allows specific CPU features to be masked out, enabling old servers to coexist with new servers in a single cluster. This too, is a setting that was almost certainly set once when the cluster was created, and nobody bothered to revisit the setting a decade later. I bet 95% VMware clusters with AVX masked are running on hardware 100% capable of using AVX. Again, this is leaving a ton of performance on the floor. Heck, I've seen brand new, uniform-hardware clusters with AVX-512 capable CPUs lobotomised down to SSE4.2 because admins have no clue what EVC actually does. I remember reading the same articles by admins just as lazy as the guy from that rant when 64-bit-only server software first appeared. "It's too hard to ask the SOE team to make a 64-bit SOE!", or "Our backup software from 1999 doesn't support 64-bit!", etc... [1] I watched several customers make this mistake, not just occasionally, but literally every time. We eventually had to block the 11-year-old VM SKUs using cloud policies to stop the unfathomable laziness.

CommanderData 4y ago
Quite an edge case but Graylog 5 requires MongoDb 5 which requires AVX. I was unable to get this setup on my 3 year old nas (920+) and had to resort to running an older version which will most likely stop getting updates very soon. AVX is old but apparently Intel decided to keep it out of certain line ups.
- pavel_odintsov 4y ago
  Yep that's serious issue and it's similar to our case. Our main product can work just fine even without SSE 4.2 but MongoDB requires it and then indirectly leads to AVX1 support as we use MongoDB as storage. We did PoC with FerretDB last month and I think it may be good option for Gerylog: https://www.ferretdb.io https://www.ferretdb.io
xet7 4y ago
Ok, so MongoDB adds requirement for AVX, and then you blame anyone having non-AVX hardware about laziness? Requiring to buy new hardware to run that software? When there could be possibility to use AVX where feature exists, and not use when it does not exist? Similarly, Win11 adds new requirements for TPM 2.0 etc, so all not having that are blamed about laziness, and required to buy new hardware to run Win11? It's like, if there is not enough landfill already.
- pavel_odintsov 4y ago
  Great feedback, thank you. We have customers in many countries around the World and in many cases even medium sized businesses cannot afford buying new equipment just to make some random software happy about CPU flags. In multiple countries import tax may reach 50% on top of equipment cost. When multiplied by exceptionally weak local currency even medium level server will cost like racing car. Old equipment without AVX is perfectly capable running modern workloads and artificial requirement to have AVX hurts people and increases digital divide. To address such cases we found nice trick by using FerretDB to replace MongoDB in such environments: https://fastnetmon.com/docs-fnm-advanced/using-fastnetmon-advanced-with-ferretdb-and-postgresql-instead-of-mongodb/ https://fastnetmon.com/docs-fnm-advanced/using-fastnetmon-ad...
- LoganDark 4y ago
  > Similarly, Win11 adds new requirements for TPM 2.0 etc, so all not having that are blamed about laziness, and required to buy new hardware to run Win11? How are people even finding hardware without a TPM? my random ASUS laptop from 2020 had a TPM, and Apple has been adding (custom) TPMs to all their computers since 2016. It's honestly more impressive that there are so many people without TPMs to use.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    The desktop computer I've been using since 2015 doesn't have a TPM and is still plenty fast for my needs. And probably lots of machines a fair bit newer don't have them either. Hardware from 2020 is very new. Luckily, I have no desire to run Windows 11.
zinekeller 4y ago
This comment honestly smells like arrogance. It's frustrating that you are writing as if ClickHouse and MongoDB is only used by large companies that are either can afford new servers or cloud production since that I have seen cases where software (especially MongoDB) being used on desktop-class and embedded-class hardware. To note, "Not all CPUs from the listed families support AVX. Generally, CPUs with the commercial denomination Core i3/i5/i7/i9 support them, whereas Pentium and Celeron CPUs before Tiger Lake do not." Intel is rather famous of withholding features for the sole sake of market segmentation (ECC anyone?) I'll withheld my expletives on you narrow-minded comment but the point is that you are only considering the subset of actual users to the point that it's not funny.
muxamilian 4y ago
It’s not only about old CPUs. Intel Atom still doesn’t support AVX. Atoms are quite common on industrial controllers. For example, Tensorflow crashes with an obscure error on Atom CPUs. If you don’t support AVX at least output an error message.
- th3typh00n 4y ago
  Recent Atom CPUs (since Gracemont) do support AVX and AVX2.

CommanderData 4y ago

Quite an edge case but Graylog 5 requires MongoDb 5 which requires AVX. I was unable to get this setup on my 3 year old nas (920+) and had to resort to running an older version which will most likely stop getting updates very soon. AVX is old but apparently Intel decided to keep it out of certain line ups.

pavel_odintsov 4y ago
Yep that's serious issue and it's similar to our case. Our main product can work just fine even without SSE 4.2 but MongoDB requires it and then indirectly leads to AVX1 support as we use MongoDB as storage. We did PoC with FerretDB last month and I think it may be good option for Gerylog: https://www.ferretdb.io https://www.ferretdb.io

xet7 4y ago

Ok, so MongoDB adds requirement for AVX, and then you blame anyone having non-AVX hardware about laziness? Requiring to buy new hardware to run that software? When there could be possibility to use AVX where feature exists, and not use when it does not exist? Similarly, Win11 adds new requirements for TPM 2.0 etc, so all not having that are blamed about laziness, and required to buy new hardware to run Win11? It's like, if there is not enough landfill already.

pavel_odintsov 4y ago
Great feedback, thank you. We have customers in many countries around the World and in many cases even medium sized businesses cannot afford buying new equipment just to make some random software happy about CPU flags. In multiple countries import tax may reach 50% on top of equipment cost. When multiplied by exceptionally weak local currency even medium level server will cost like racing car. Old equipment without AVX is perfectly capable running modern workloads and artificial requirement to have AVX hurts people and increases digital divide. To address such cases we found nice trick by using FerretDB to replace MongoDB in such environments: https://fastnetmon.com/docs-fnm-advanced/using-fastnetmon-advanced-with-ferretdb-and-postgresql-instead-of-mongodb/ https://fastnetmon.com/docs-fnm-advanced/using-fastnetmon-ad...
LoganDark 4y ago
> Similarly, Win11 adds new requirements for TPM 2.0 etc, so all not having that are blamed about laziness, and required to buy new hardware to run Win11? How are people even finding hardware without a TPM? my random ASUS laptop from 2020 had a TPM, and Apple has been adding (custom) TPMs to all their computers since 2016. It's honestly more impressive that there are so many people without TPMs to use.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  The desktop computer I've been using since 2015 doesn't have a TPM and is still plenty fast for my needs. And probably lots of machines a fair bit newer don't have them either. Hardware from 2020 is very new. Luckily, I have no desire to run Windows 11.

zinekeller 4y ago

This comment honestly smells like arrogance. It's frustrating that you are writing as if ClickHouse and MongoDB is only used by large companies that are either can afford new servers or cloud production since that I have seen cases where software (especially MongoDB) being used on desktop-class and embedded-class hardware. To note, "Not all CPUs from the listed families support AVX. Generally, CPUs with the commercial denomination Core i3/i5/i7/i9 support them, whereas Pentium and Celeron CPUs before Tiger Lake do not." Intel is rather famous of withholding features for the sole sake of market segmentation (ECC anyone?) I'll withheld my expletives on you narrow-minded comment but the point is that you are only considering the subset of actual users to the point that it's not funny.

muxamilian 4y ago

It’s not only about old CPUs. Intel Atom still doesn’t support AVX. Atoms are quite common on industrial controllers. For example, Tensorflow crashes with an obscure error on Atom CPUs. If you don’t support AVX at least output an error message.

th3typh00n 4y ago
Recent Atom CPUs (since Gracemont) do support AVX and AVX2.