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Re:Is optical fibers used for distributed systems? by talldayo on Monday July 01, 2024 @07:08PM (#40851811)
Network switching can become a bottleneck of it's own, especially once you reach fiber-scale. It's generally better to avoid fiber if you can these days, especially since there are fleetingly few applications that will saturate a modern fiber optic connection.
Re:Is optical fibers used for distributed systems? by GianFabien on Tuesday July 02, 2024 @12:25AM (#40853558)
Fiber has been used for over twenty years to connect storage systems to compute resources. Recently, Ethernet over fiber is becoming more common.

As @talidayo points out, the fiber connections are unlikely to be saturated. What hurts distributed systems is the overhead of message sending, the packing and unpacking of transmission data structures. As a rudimentary rule, individual nodes / services should spend only a small fraction of the resources and time for marshaling data and the rest on useful computation.

Re:Is optical fibers used for distributed systems? by lifeinthevoid on Tuesday July 02, 2024 @09:56AM (#40856746)
In my experience latency is more of a problem than throughput, but then again, totally depends on the kind of application you're building.