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I never really understand the challenges of web scalability - the hard problem I see is bandwidth. Distributing work, other than the lag in communication maybe?
by jheriko 13y ago
I never really understand the challenges of web scalability - the hard problem I see is bandwidth. Distributing work, other than the lag in communication maybe? Being clever about bandwidth usage in some special ways?
Why isn't it just bandwidth limited? throwing data around aside from crossing the network layer is extremely fast and easy... surely distributing the load is even a secondary problem to being efficient with the bandwidth, since efficient load distribution seems also like it should be network bandwidth (not, e.g. clock cycle, memory, disk access...) limited.
1 million anythings a second is a pretty low number in many computing environments - this is much less than (about two orders of magnitude) the pixel throughput on the monitor you are reading this on, as a trivial example.
- lukev 13y agoWell, let's see... In the case of my monitor, the software sets a single byte in a direct memory array which is then sent directly to the monitor via a direct, dedicated connection, for a total distance of about 3 feet. An HTTP request is usually closer to a kilobyte. So there's your two orders of magnitude, right there. Then add in the fact that the communication channels are miles long, routed through dozens of separate hardware modules, shared not only with other traffic but with other protocols, subject to synchronization and concurrency issues, etc... Really, the situations aren't comparable at all. Not to say networking couldn't be faster. But it's a very, very different problem.