6 ms·

We also have much much bigger single machines available for reasonable money. So a lot of reasonable workloads can fit in one machine now that used to require a

We also have much much bigger single machines available for reasonable money. So a lot of reasonable workloads can fit in one machine now that used to require a small cluster

didgetmaster 2y ago
Hardware has certainly progressed significantly over the years, but the size of workloads has also grown. The big question is: Does a 'reasonable' workloads today fit on a single machine better than a 'reasonable' workload did 20 years ago?
Dalewyn 2y ago
It's kind of mind boggling just how powerful mundane desktop computers have gotten, let alone server hardware. Think about it: That 20 core CPU (eg: i7 14700K) you can buy for just a couple hundred dollars today would have been supercomputer hardware costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just a decade ago.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  According to geekbench, an i9 4790 processor released a decade ago is ~5 times slower than i7 14700. 4790's go for $30 at ebay, vs $300 for 14700, so price/performance seems to be in favor of older hardware:)
  - Breza 2y ago
    You might like https://labgopher.com/ https://labgopher.com/
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    On the other hand, the E7-8890 v3 (the closest equivalent to a 14700K in core count at the time from a quick glance) had an MSRP of $7174.00[1]. So maybe I was a bit too high on the pricing earlier, but my point still stands that the computing horsepower we have such easy access to today was literal big time magic just a decade ago. [1]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84685/intel-xeon-processor-e7-8890-v3-45m-cache-2-50-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84685/i...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    What about power consumption? When running a server 24/7, power is likely to be a bigger cost concern than the one-off cost of purchasing the processor.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      Under full load, roughly 100W for the 4790, and 350W for the 14700. Note that both links are for the K variant, and also, both were achieved running Prime95. More normal workloads are probably around 2/3 those peak values. For a desktop, yeah, you’re generally better off buying newer from a performance/$ standpoint. For servers, the calculus can shift a bit depending on your company’s size and workloads. Most smaller companies (small is relative, but let’s go with “monthly cloud bill is < $1MM”) could run on surprisingly old hardware and not care. I have three Dell R620s, which are over a decade old. They have distributed storage via Ceph on NVMe over Mellanox ConnectX3-PRO. I’ve run DB benchmarks (with realistic schema and queries, not synthetic), and they nearly always outclass similarly-sized RDS and Aurora instances, despite the latter having multiple generations of hardware advancements. Local NVMe over Infiniband means near-zero latency. Similarly, between the three of them, I have 384 GiB of RAM, and 36C/72T. Both of those could go significantly higher. Those three, plus various networking gear, plus two Supermicro servers stuffed with spinning disks pulls down around 700W on average under mild load. Even if I loaded the compute up, I sincerely doubt I’d hit 1 kW. Even then, it doesn’t really matter for a business, because you’re going to colo them, and you’re generally granted a flat power budget per U. The downside of course is that you need someone[s] on staff that knows how to provision and maintain servers, but it’s honestly not that hard to learn. [0]: https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review/page-11/ https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review... [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-review https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-r...
  - scotty79 2y ago
    I think for server type workloads to get performance improvement estimate it would be reasonable to compare single core performance and multiply by the ratio of number of cores.
- teleforce 2y ago
  The RAM also get much larger and cheaper, and it is now possible to have several terabyte (TB) of RAM memory (not storage), in a single PC or workstation. This i7 14700K can support 192 GB RAM but other lower end Xeon CPU W for workstation for example w3-2423 costing around USD350 can support 2 TB RAM albeit only 6-core [1]. But then with not so much more extra budgets you can scale the machine to your heart's content [2]. [1] Intel Xeon w3-2423 Processor 15M Cache, 2.10 GHz: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233484/intel-xeon-w32423-processor-15m-cache-2-10-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233484/... [2] Intel Launches Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 Processors For Workstations: Up to 56 Cores and 112 PCIe 5.0 Lanes: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18741/intel-launches-xeon-w-3400-and-w-2400-processors-for-workstations-up-to-56-cores-and-112-pcie-5-0-lanes https://www.anandtech.com/show/18741/intel-launches-xeon-w-3...
  - Breza 2y ago
    Good point. And going back to the start of this thread, you can put a whole lot of Postgre into a machine with even a few hundred gigs of RAM.
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hardware box doing it on ingress!
- throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
  I used to administrate a small fleet of sun sparc hosts with SSL accelerators. They were so much money $$$$. I proposed dumping them all for a smaller set of x86 hosts running linux, it took 2-3 years before the old admins believed in the performance and cost savings. They refused to believe it would even work.
  - rastignack 2y ago
    I have the same memories, trying to convince people to dump slow as hell sparc processors for database workloads in favor of X86 machines costing a 10th of the price. To this day I still argue with ex Solaris sysadmins.
  - JeremyNT 2y ago
    I lived through that era too, it was wild to see how quickly x86 dethroned sparc (even Intel's big misses like Itanium were only minor bumps in the road). Those days, you had to carefully architect your infrastructure and design your workload to deal with it, and every hardware improvement required you to reevaluate what you were doing. Hence novel architectural choices. Everything is way easier for normal sized organizations now, and that level of optimization is just no longer required outside of companies doing huge scale.
- bjourne 2y ago
  15 years ago I ran a website (Django+Postgres+memcached) serving 50k unique daily visitors on a dirt cheap vps. Even back then the scalability issues were overstated.
  - namaria 2y ago
    As the stock market prices now expected future growth, architecture had to justify rising stock prices by promising future scalability. It was never about the actual workloads, much more about growth projections. And a whole lot of cargo cult behavior.
bamboozled 2y ago
What happens when the single machine fails?
- perbu 2y ago
  Machine failures are few and far between these days. Over the last four years I've had a cluster of perhaps 10 machines. Not a single hardware failure. Loads of software issues, of course. I know this is just an anecdote, but I'm pretty certain reliability has increased by one or two orders of magnitude since the 90s.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Also anecdotally, I’ve been running 12th gen Dells (over a decade old at this point) for several years. I’ve had some RAM sticks report ECC failures (reseat them), an HBA lose its mind and cause the ZFS pool to offline (reseat the HBA and its cables), and precisely one actual failure – a PSU. They’re redundant and hot-swappable, so I bought a new one and fixed it.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    You didn't answer the question though. You're answer is "it won't" and that isn't a good strategy.
    - Zababa 2y ago
      It is in that if something happens less often, you don't need to prepare for it as much if the severity stays the same (cue in Nassim Taleb entering the conversation).
      - bamboozled 2y ago
        I'm not sure what types of products you work on, but it's kind of rare at most companies I've worked at where having a backup like that is a workable solution.
- venv 2y ago
koliber 2y ago
This was true in the 2000's and 2010's as well. A lot of the work could be handled by a single monolithic app running on one or a small handful of servers. However, because of the microservices fad, people often created complicated microservices distributed across auto-scaling kubernetes clusters, just for the art of it. It was unneeded complexity then, as it is now, in the majority of cases.

We also have much much bigger single machines available for reasonable money. So a lot of reasonable workloads can fit in one machine now that used to require a small cluster

didgetmaster 2y ago

Hardware has certainly progressed significantly over the years, but the size of workloads has also grown. The big question is: Does a 'reasonable' workloads today fit on a single machine better than a 'reasonable' workload did 20 years ago?

Dalewyn 2y ago

It's kind of mind boggling just how powerful mundane desktop computers have gotten, let alone server hardware. Think about it: That 20 core CPU (eg: i7 14700K) you can buy for just a couple hundred dollars today would have been supercomputer hardware costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just a decade ago.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
According to geekbench, an i9 4790 processor released a decade ago is ~5 times slower than i7 14700. 4790's go for $30 at ebay, vs $300 for 14700, so price/performance seems to be in favor of older hardware:)
- Breza 2y ago
  You might like https://labgopher.com/ https://labgopher.com/
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  On the other hand, the E7-8890 v3 (the closest equivalent to a 14700K in core count at the time from a quick glance) had an MSRP of $7174.00[1]. So maybe I was a bit too high on the pricing earlier, but my point still stands that the computing horsepower we have such easy access to today was literal big time magic just a decade ago. [1]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84685/intel-xeon-processor-e7-8890-v3-45m-cache-2-50-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84685/i...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  What about power consumption? When running a server 24/7, power is likely to be a bigger cost concern than the one-off cost of purchasing the processor.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Under full load, roughly 100W for the 4790, and 350W for the 14700. Note that both links are for the K variant, and also, both were achieved running Prime95. More normal workloads are probably around 2/3 those peak values. For a desktop, yeah, you’re generally better off buying newer from a performance/$ standpoint. For servers, the calculus can shift a bit depending on your company’s size and workloads. Most smaller companies (small is relative, but let’s go with “monthly cloud bill is < $1MM”) could run on surprisingly old hardware and not care. I have three Dell R620s, which are over a decade old. They have distributed storage via Ceph on NVMe over Mellanox ConnectX3-PRO. I’ve run DB benchmarks (with realistic schema and queries, not synthetic), and they nearly always outclass similarly-sized RDS and Aurora instances, despite the latter having multiple generations of hardware advancements. Local NVMe over Infiniband means near-zero latency. Similarly, between the three of them, I have 384 GiB of RAM, and 36C/72T. Both of those could go significantly higher. Those three, plus various networking gear, plus two Supermicro servers stuffed with spinning disks pulls down around 700W on average under mild load. Even if I loaded the compute up, I sincerely doubt I’d hit 1 kW. Even then, it doesn’t really matter for a business, because you’re going to colo them, and you’re generally granted a flat power budget per U. The downside of course is that you need someone[s] on staff that knows how to provision and maintain servers, but it’s honestly not that hard to learn. [0]: https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review/page-11/ https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review... [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-review https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-r...
- scotty79 2y ago
  I think for server type workloads to get performance improvement estimate it would be reasonable to compare single core performance and multiply by the ratio of number of cores.
teleforce 2y ago
The RAM also get much larger and cheaper, and it is now possible to have several terabyte (TB) of RAM memory (not storage), in a single PC or workstation. This i7 14700K can support 192 GB RAM but other lower end Xeon CPU W for workstation for example w3-2423 costing around USD350 can support 2 TB RAM albeit only 6-core [1]. But then with not so much more extra budgets you can scale the machine to your heart's content [2]. [1] Intel Xeon w3-2423 Processor 15M Cache, 2.10 GHz: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233484/intel-xeon-w32423-processor-15m-cache-2-10-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233484/... [2] Intel Launches Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 Processors For Workstations: Up to 56 Cores and 112 PCIe 5.0 Lanes: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18741/intel-launches-xeon-w-3400-and-w-2400-processors-for-workstations-up-to-56-cores-and-112-pcie-5-0-lanes https://www.anandtech.com/show/18741/intel-launches-xeon-w-3...
- Breza 2y ago
  Good point. And going back to the start of this thread, you can put a whole lot of Postgre into a machine with even a few hundred gigs of RAM.

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

This! You NEEDED to scale horizontally because machines were just doing too much. I remember when our Apache boxes couldn’t even cope doing SSL so we had a hardware box doing it on ingress!

throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
I used to administrate a small fleet of sun sparc hosts with SSL accelerators. They were so much money $$$$. I proposed dumping them all for a smaller set of x86 hosts running linux, it took 2-3 years before the old admins believed in the performance and cost savings. They refused to believe it would even work.
- rastignack 2y ago
  I have the same memories, trying to convince people to dump slow as hell sparc processors for database workloads in favor of X86 machines costing a 10th of the price. To this day I still argue with ex Solaris sysadmins.
- JeremyNT 2y ago
  I lived through that era too, it was wild to see how quickly x86 dethroned sparc (even Intel's big misses like Itanium were only minor bumps in the road). Those days, you had to carefully architect your infrastructure and design your workload to deal with it, and every hardware improvement required you to reevaluate what you were doing. Hence novel architectural choices. Everything is way easier for normal sized organizations now, and that level of optimization is just no longer required outside of companies doing huge scale.
bjourne 2y ago
15 years ago I ran a website (Django+Postgres+memcached) serving 50k unique daily visitors on a dirt cheap vps. Even back then the scalability issues were overstated.
- namaria 2y ago
  As the stock market prices now expected future growth, architecture had to justify rising stock prices by promising future scalability. It was never about the actual workloads, much more about growth projections. And a whole lot of cargo cult behavior.

bamboozled 2y ago

What happens when the single machine fails?

perbu 2y ago
Machine failures are few and far between these days. Over the last four years I've had a cluster of perhaps 10 machines. Not a single hardware failure. Loads of software issues, of course. I know this is just an anecdote, but I'm pretty certain reliability has increased by one or two orders of magnitude since the 90s.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Also anecdotally, I’ve been running 12th gen Dells (over a decade old at this point) for several years. I’ve had some RAM sticks report ECC failures (reseat them), an HBA lose its mind and cause the ZFS pool to offline (reseat the HBA and its cables), and precisely one actual failure – a PSU. They’re redundant and hot-swappable, so I bought a new one and fixed it.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  You didn't answer the question though. You're answer is "it won't" and that isn't a good strategy.
  - Zababa 2y ago
    It is in that if something happens less often, you don't need to prepare for it as much if the severity stays the same (cue in Nassim Taleb entering the conversation).
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      I'm not sure what types of products you work on, but it's kind of rare at most companies I've worked at where having a backup like that is a workable solution.
venv 2y ago

koliber 2y ago

This was true in the 2000's and 2010's as well. A lot of the work could be handled by a single monolithic app running on one or a small handful of servers. However, because of the microservices fad, people often created complicated microservices distributed across auto-scaling kubernetes clusters, just for the art of it. It was unneeded complexity then, as it is now, in the majority of cases.