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Such scale also creates opportunities. If you have 10 servers, a developer can't spend a couple of months to get a 0.1% performance boost--the benefit will nev
by compiler-guy 2y ago
Such scale also creates opportunities.
If you have 10 servers, a developer can't spend a couple of months to get a 0.1% performance boost--the benefit will never cover the cost. If you have 100,000 servers, it just might. If you have 1,000,000 servers, it almost certainly is worth an entire team looking for that much performance, year in and year out.
This is true of performance, avoiding downtime, or whatever else. You could never justify such an expense at a startup, but with sufficient scale they pay for themselves many times over.
- closeparen 2y agoA large company's million servers are going to be partitioned across thousands of separate applications. The biggest ones do benefit from performance work, but a large portion of the server count is going to be a long tail of services that aren't individually worth that much effort.
- vlovich123 2y agoThey would rarely be partitioned because of all the waste - workloads are typically placed cotenant into 1 machine (VMs, containers, normal multi-processing, etc). But I believe you’re right that cumulatively there would be a lot of long tail services that consume resources and the cumulative inefficiencies aren’t being optimized because it’s work that doesn’t scale (i.e. you’d have to fix too many performance issues on services no one cares to make a visible overall dent). Not sure why you’re downvoted though - it’s an astute observation.