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Some of these tips are really good (using a CDN, caching on basically every layer, using YSlow), but does the author really believe using FPGAs and ASICs for we
by iheartmemcache 17y ago
Some of these tips are really good (using a CDN, caching on basically every layer, using YSlow), but does the author really believe using FPGAs and ASICs for websites is really practical? I've yet to see one real-world report of people using FPGAs to speed up sites. Hell, I haven't even seen any academic proof of concepts focusing on the merits of FPGAs in the web environment.
That's not to say that FPGA's won't be useful (they could potentially be helpful for real-time ranking and the like), it just seems out of character to mention something like that on a website scalability site. Grain of salt, and all that.
- agnokapathetic 17y agoIt is overkill, but dedicated special purpose hardware like a hardware SSL Accelerator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration) is certainly useful, and its not unfathomable that one of these would use an FPGA.
- olefoo 17y agoI think it's the web nerds equivalent of mechanics talking about Formula 1 race cars, most people who are in the field will never even be closing to needing that level of technology, but when you do you really do. If you are doing lots of ssl connections some form of accelerator, whether drop in cards or a standalone box, are well worth the cost.
- smithjchris 17y agoFPGAs are impractical. They are designed for integration and custom design rather than performance. Any data processing tasks are probably not worth it. Intel i7 series CPUs are probably a better investment as they have native text-processing instructions!
- Andys 17y agoI just found a benchmark on Intel's site that shows the effect of enabling the text processing instructions in SSE4.2. They claim a 25% speedup for XML parsing and 37% for XML validating.