5 ms·

"4 boxes with 1x RAM will always be cheaper than 1 box with 4X RAM." Is that really true? RAM is dirt cheap compared to everything else that goes into a server

"4 boxes with 1x RAM will always be cheaper than 1 box with 4X RAM." Is that really true? RAM is dirt cheap compared to everything else that goes into a server. And then later under "Lessons Learned" we have: "Put it all on one box if you can. If you don’t need a distributed system then don’t build one. They are complicated and expensive to build."

titusjohnson 12y ago
I haven't run the numbers, but I would imagine that 4 boxes with 256 GB of RAM are significantly cheaper than 1 box with 1TB of RAM, especially if the rest of the box isn't top-end equipment.
- daigoba66 12y ago
  At that scale... you may be right. Jumping above 256 GB of RAM on a server is still pretty expensive.
- gtuhl 12y ago
  The density of the DIMMs is where the price difference jumps. Right now 32GB sticks push the price way up. Common current chassis have 24 slots letting you hit 384GB total with no big surprises on 16GB sticks. Getting to 1TB would certainly require 32GB sticks and would be the point where multiple machines gets cheaper.
voidlogic 12y ago
This varies by the amount of RAM, if the total RAM being talked about is <= 256 GB (or in some cases 128) this statement will usually be false. But for RAM totals above 256 GB (and in some cases 512) it is almost always true. But these watermarks will change over time so this assumption must but re-evaluated from time to time.
- msiebuhr 12y ago
  $WORK anecdote: We had a quartet of legacy-ish databases with sharded customer data (had some interconnection, but we sharded in the application-layer, so the database didn't have to move any data internally). It was a bitch to maintain, but it performed OK, by throwing fairly beefy machines at it. We began a quest to replace the database with MongoDB/HDFS/Riak/CouchBase/Cassandra/whatever. We wrote a script that converted our data to JSON for easier ingestion and began hammering away. Until we discovered that by converting it to JSON (and simplifying some parts of the data-model), our dataset had actually become small enough to fit on a single server in memory (still ~100GB). So we ditched the cluster-thingie and moved everything to CouchDB. Pricy hardware, but the saved man-hours recouped that within a month or two. (And in half a year's time, the database will have outgrown whatever hardware we can reasonably throw at it, so then we'll have to start over for real...)
  - ddorian43 12y ago
    But why throw it in couchdb when you could use a rdbms ?
    - collyw 12y ago
      It must be web scale.
    - msiebuhr 12y ago
      We don't need a RDBMS; we get along quite well with key/value + keyscans, making it a lot easier to switch to a database with roughly similar features later (CouchBase, Cassandra, HBase, possibly others)
      - collyw 12y ago
        OK, slightly ignorant question here, but SQL is kind of a standard for RDBMS's. As far as I am aware no similar starts exists in the NoSQL world, so I would have assumed that it would make switching harder. If you are just using it for basic stuff, then "SELECT * FROM table" is pretty standard across RDBMS's.
      - 12y ago
redwall_hp 12y ago
RAM is cheap, and the rest of the box costs more than the RAM, so I'd say no. Let's say a 1GB module costs $25 and a 4GB one is $40. (Just picking some random Corsair ones of compatible specs and disregarding things like using matched pairs of lesser capacity instead of single modules. For simplicity.) Two of those 1GB modules would already cost more than one 4GB one. And that's to say nothing of the rest of the hardware, which you can entirely avoid if you have a single system instead of four. The only place it makes sense is VMs through a cloud provider, where memory is often one of the big pricing metrics. It's possible there could be savings through some of those providers.
- gedrap 12y ago
  That's true for this scale, and probably up to 32GB or so. But bitly is running at much larger scale and he is talking about hundreds of GBs, which is a totally different game.
- abhinavk 12y ago
  I don't think that they are putting 1GB or 4GB modules in their boxes.
dangrossman 12y ago
If you're building your own boxes, sure the price of physical sticks of RAM aren't the bulk of the cost, and you can build high-RAM boxes. If you're renting servers or virtual servers (VPS/cloud), then the physical cost of RAM is irrelevant. Virtually all hosting companies use configured RAM as a proxy for their costs (the more RAM you need, the more likely you are to be using more CPU which means more electric, more disk IO, more bandwidth, and generally putting more wear-and-tear on the hardware which will need replacing sooner). An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations).
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations). I never understood this. I started and sold a hosting company in the early 2000's. I've run managed hosting divisions for Fortune 500 companies. Hosting is STUPID profitable (>30% margins). Why doesn't Y Combinator grab 10-20 racks in a cheap colo center, buy $100K-$200K worth of equipment, and provision that to YC startups similar to Rackspace's OnMetal offering? I do DevOps now, but colo is still not as hard as everyone makes it out to be.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Who'd maintain & administer it? As I understand it, YC is not in the business of providing business services to its portfolio companies. They setup the network and information, but they don't really have headcount or hiring expertise to bring functional roles in-house and then rent them out to portfolio companies for cheap. It's an interesting question whether there's a market for an investment firm that does do this. One of the things that appealed to me about Google under Eric Schmidt was that it basically functioned as a venture capital firm that had shared technology infrastructure, server maintenance, legal, PR, etc. but let you choose what to work on and come up with your own product ideas, with the one caveat that Google would own any business you built. It'd be very interesting to see a VC firm that did the same - cover all the functional roles so that entrepreneurs could focus on pure product development. I hear a16z is sorta shooting for that, but they cover more of the human-capital stuff like recruitment, executive search, etc. rather than the technical stuff.

titusjohnson 12y ago

I haven't run the numbers, but I would imagine that 4 boxes with 256 GB of RAM are significantly cheaper than 1 box with 1TB of RAM, especially if the rest of the box isn't top-end equipment.

daigoba66 12y ago
At that scale... you may be right. Jumping above 256 GB of RAM on a server is still pretty expensive.
gtuhl 12y ago
The density of the DIMMs is where the price difference jumps. Right now 32GB sticks push the price way up. Common current chassis have 24 slots letting you hit 384GB total with no big surprises on 16GB sticks. Getting to 1TB would certainly require 32GB sticks and would be the point where multiple machines gets cheaper.

voidlogic 12y ago

This varies by the amount of RAM, if the total RAM being talked about is <= 256 GB (or in some cases 128) this statement will usually be false. But for RAM totals above 256 GB (and in some cases 512) it is almost always true. But these watermarks will change over time so this assumption must but re-evaluated from time to time.

msiebuhr 12y ago
$WORK anecdote: We had a quartet of legacy-ish databases with sharded customer data (had some interconnection, but we sharded in the application-layer, so the database didn't have to move any data internally). It was a bitch to maintain, but it performed OK, by throwing fairly beefy machines at it. We began a quest to replace the database with MongoDB/HDFS/Riak/CouchBase/Cassandra/whatever. We wrote a script that converted our data to JSON for easier ingestion and began hammering away. Until we discovered that by converting it to JSON (and simplifying some parts of the data-model), our dataset had actually become small enough to fit on a single server in memory (still ~100GB). So we ditched the cluster-thingie and moved everything to CouchDB. Pricy hardware, but the saved man-hours recouped that within a month or two. (And in half a year's time, the database will have outgrown whatever hardware we can reasonably throw at it, so then we'll have to start over for real...)
- ddorian43 12y ago
  But why throw it in couchdb when you could use a rdbms ?
  - collyw 12y ago
    It must be web scale.
  - msiebuhr 12y ago
    We don't need a RDBMS; we get along quite well with key/value + keyscans, making it a lot easier to switch to a database with roughly similar features later (CouchBase, Cassandra, HBase, possibly others)
    - collyw 12y ago
      OK, slightly ignorant question here, but SQL is kind of a standard for RDBMS's. As far as I am aware no similar starts exists in the NoSQL world, so I would have assumed that it would make switching harder. If you are just using it for basic stuff, then "SELECT * FROM table" is pretty standard across RDBMS's.
    - 12y ago

redwall_hp 12y ago

RAM is cheap, and the rest of the box costs more than the RAM, so I'd say no. Let's say a 1GB module costs $25 and a 4GB one is $40. (Just picking some random Corsair ones of compatible specs and disregarding things like using matched pairs of lesser capacity instead of single modules. For simplicity.) Two of those 1GB modules would already cost more than one 4GB one. And that's to say nothing of the rest of the hardware, which you can entirely avoid if you have a single system instead of four. The only place it makes sense is VMs through a cloud provider, where memory is often one of the big pricing metrics. It's possible there could be savings through some of those providers.

gedrap 12y ago
That's true for this scale, and probably up to 32GB or so. But bitly is running at much larger scale and he is talking about hundreds of GBs, which is a totally different game.
abhinavk 12y ago
I don't think that they are putting 1GB or 4GB modules in their boxes.

dangrossman 12y ago

If you're building your own boxes, sure the price of physical sticks of RAM aren't the bulk of the cost, and you can build high-RAM boxes. If you're renting servers or virtual servers (VPS/cloud), then the physical cost of RAM is irrelevant. Virtually all hosting companies use configured RAM as a proxy for their costs (the more RAM you need, the more likely you are to be using more CPU which means more electric, more disk IO, more bandwidth, and generally putting more wear-and-tear on the hardware which will need replacing sooner). An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations).

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations). I never understood this. I started and sold a hosting company in the early 2000's. I've run managed hosting divisions for Fortune 500 companies. Hosting is STUPID profitable (>30% margins). Why doesn't Y Combinator grab 10-20 racks in a cheap colo center, buy $100K-$200K worth of equipment, and provision that to YC startups similar to Rackspace's OnMetal offering? I do DevOps now, but colo is still not as hard as everyone makes it out to be.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Who'd maintain & administer it? As I understand it, YC is not in the business of providing business services to its portfolio companies. They setup the network and information, but they don't really have headcount or hiring expertise to bring functional roles in-house and then rent them out to portfolio companies for cheap. It's an interesting question whether there's a market for an investment firm that does do this. One of the things that appealed to me about Google under Eric Schmidt was that it basically functioned as a venture capital firm that had shared technology infrastructure, server maintenance, legal, PR, etc. but let you choose what to work on and come up with your own product ideas, with the one caveat that Google would own any business you built. It'd be very interesting to see a VC firm that did the same - cover all the functional roles so that entrepreneurs could focus on pure product development. I hear a16z is sorta shooting for that, but they cover more of the human-capital stuff like recruitment, executive search, etc. rather than the technical stuff.