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The other "leak" in these abstractions that arises from physical limits is performance, especially when it comes to IO. This is a major problem for databases a
by Nextgrid 3y ago
The other "leak" in these abstractions that arises from physical limits is performance, especially when it comes to IO.
This is a major problem for databases and ultimately makes database "portability"/fault tolerance tricky since they work best with direct-attach storage that's inherently bound to a single physical machine.
- pm90 3y agoNot to mention there is all sorts of other limits that you can hit at scale just on the compute layer itself (eg max pids, file descriptors etc). I don’t know if we can truly abstract away the underlying system. The best we can do is give a best effort approximation that works in most cases, but explicitly call out the limits when they are reached. I suspect that this is just the bubbling up of the underlying physics limitation of having limited resources where compute is run.