Re:Why the data center needs an operating system
by mattbee on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @10:44PM
(#8697749)
Totally agree on that front. Efficient software = fewer servers. You can't know when to invest in new capacity if you can't tell the difference between hitting the limit of the hardware, and a fixable performance problem. Seemded like Twitter wasn't sure what was going on there for a few years :)
We do a lot of finding ENORMOUS performance problems with customer servers - simple stuff like a thundering herd, a vital missing index or a filesystem that's being overtaxed That's the kind of scale we work at. But those sorts of insights can make the difference between "help we might need a new server" and "oh thank god it's all working again".
Re:Why the data center needs an operating system
by lmm on Thursday December 04, 2014 @05:46AM
(#8698680)
At Google scale it matters, sure. But most companies aren't Google scale. Writing your single-company 100-user CRUD webapp in Java or C++ "for performance" is the ultimate false economy.
/I used to work for a company that had a big Java app. We laughed at our client who needed 60 Rails servers to deliver worse performance than our single-instance app. But they probably saved more on dev costs than they spent on servers.
The people bankrolling Google / Facebook / Twitter's electricity bills seem to care quite a bit.
There is another trope that gets repeated often, (and this is not even remotely directed at you, just a digression hopefully somewhat on topic) "performant languages runtimes are an anachronism, a bog slow language in which a programmer can code fast is way more useful than any of the performance bull crap". Typically the person repeating that would a be a webdev. However, in these large scale scenarios core infrastructural code can save orders of magnitude more in money in running costs than saving days in software development. So yeah at the interesting places algorithms and efficiency continue to matter. A reason that Google always managed to be ahead is partly due to how successful it was in minimizing running costs.