4 ms·

I think mechanical sympathy is still useful, even in a world of 'plenty'.. it's people with that kind of understanding who are able to get current day compute

by FLT8 3y ago

I think mechanical sympathy is still useful, even in a world of 'plenty'.. it's people with that kind of understanding who are able to get current day computers to do things that others will have to wait until tomorrow to achieve.

bombcar 3y ago
There's something to be said for learning the various effects virtualization layers can have, even if they're not affecting you today. Something similar will happen again at another level.
corysama 3y ago
When I was streaming audio and video in PlayStation 2 games, I had to care a lot about physical disk layout. But, even then it boiled down to: Seek times are huge, sector and cluster sizes are your atomic ops under the hood, inner rings are low-bandwidth-low-variance, outer rings are high-bandwidth-high-variance. Since then, not so much. These days with NVMe drives, things are much easier. But, there are still things to keep in mind. I haven't dug deep. But, my impression is: Even though 4K random reads are incredibly faster than they used to be, large (256K-2MB) reads are yet faster still. Maxing out modern drives requires having multiple requests in flight. So, multiple threads or async operations. Modern drives are so fast that the memory copies involved in buffered fread() can add 33ish% overhead. Consider memory-mapped read-only files. Even better: If you have millions of users, you need 1-in-a-million reliability. Consider SQLite or LMDB as alternatives to fwrite().
- VelesDude 3y ago
  I completely forgot about that. I never directly worked on the audio side but I did hear a little from others and the relief that came with the Xbox and caching audio on the HDD. It essentially cut-down on a lot of those issues. And by the next generation, it was only the Wii that you still had to kind of worry about that stuff.
- somat 3y ago
  With spinning drives, there was an art to partitioning, where you would lay out your partitions to give some ideal spots on the disk. It probably did not really matter that much. but some people swore that putting your swap partition first was critical to having any sort of performance.

by FLT8 3y ago

bombcar 3y ago

There's something to be said for learning the various effects virtualization layers can have, even if they're not affecting you today. Something similar will happen again at another level.

corysama 3y ago

When I was streaming audio and video in PlayStation 2 games, I had to care a lot about physical disk layout. But, even then it boiled down to: Seek times are huge, sector and cluster sizes are your atomic ops under the hood, inner rings are low-bandwidth-low-variance, outer rings are high-bandwidth-high-variance. Since then, not so much. These days with NVMe drives, things are much easier. But, there are still things to keep in mind. I haven't dug deep. But, my impression is: Even though 4K random reads are incredibly faster than they used to be, large (256K-2MB) reads are yet faster still. Maxing out modern drives requires having multiple requests in flight. So, multiple threads or async operations. Modern drives are so fast that the memory copies involved in buffered fread() can add 33ish% overhead. Consider memory-mapped read-only files. Even better: If you have millions of users, you need 1-in-a-million reliability. Consider SQLite or LMDB as alternatives to fwrite().

VelesDude 3y ago
I completely forgot about that. I never directly worked on the audio side but I did hear a little from others and the relief that came with the Xbox and caching audio on the HDD. It essentially cut-down on a lot of those issues. And by the next generation, it was only the Wii that you still had to kind of worry about that stuff.
somat 3y ago
With spinning drives, there was an art to partitioning, where you would lay out your partitions to give some ideal spots on the disk. It probably did not really matter that much. but some people swore that putting your swap partition first was critical to having any sort of performance.