Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#1

Post by groundthrower » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

We have a performance intensive application running on a AMD Epyc dedicated instance with 32 cores (our application is highly parallelizable)

We just noticed locally on our dev environment that our M1 is actually performing better performance wise (don’t ask me how).

We are now considering switching our production servers to M1 minis which is also offered by our cloud provider. Do you have any experience on running M1s / Mac in an production environment regarding stability / uptime etc?

Edit: it’s a Rust application which uses the Rayon crate. The application gets on average one request a minute which crunches some numbers for an average of 2 seconds - so it’s mostly idle. No disk IO.

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#2

Post by p_papageorgiou » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

Any more details about the workload type of your application? Single threaded / Multithreaded / AI etc

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#3

Post by al2o3cr » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

    don’t ask me how

_You_ should be asking you how - there are lots of reasons why this could be happening and knowing which one is important if you're changing stuff.

Based on a "highly parallelizable" application performing better on 8 cores than 32, I'd guess you're running out of something else: memory or disk bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#4

Post by Someone1234 » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

No currently offered M1 Mini has redundant fail-over power or storage. Also, without knowing how your cloud provider has cooling setup it is unclear how well it will operate under heavy load for extended periods of time (blade servers are designed for that specific workload and have cooling solutions to match).

My point is: If your workload is time critical, and you cannot afford downtime/outages then it may not be for you. If your workload can afford the time it would take to adopt a new M1 Mini when the old one dies, then maybe?

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#5

Post by gjsman-1000 » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

No - but I can give a few suggestions.

One would be to look, if you haven’t, at MacStadium and what they’ve got there. You can get an M1 Mini there and it will be run by experts who know all about using M1 minis for servers. Considering your application is highly parallelizable, this would also make it easy to upgrade to the M1 Pro with double the performance cores down the line.

Secondly, if your application is running better on M1, that reeks of an application which is somehow greatly benefiting at single-threaded performance somewhere, which the M1 excels and the Epyc is poor at. That probably needs some investigation.

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#6

Post by krageon » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

If you do not understand why your performance profile is as it is, how do you know next week's patch won't make it perform better on AMD machines suddenly? You should understand your problem before you solve it.

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#7

Post by bpicolo » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

No currently offered M1 Mini has redundant fail-over power or storage. Also, without knowing how your cloud provider has cooling setup it is unclear how well it will operate under heavy load for extended periods of time (blade servers are designed for that specific workload and have cooling solutions to match). My point is: If your workload is time critical, and you cannot afford downtime/outages then it may not be f…

Does that include the AWS launched M1 instances last week?

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#8

Post by crankyadmin » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

Knowing what the development language is as well would help a lot - but the first thing you want to do is get some instrumentation on both your 32 Core AMD box and your M1 and compare the two.

The M1 is very fast at doing certain things and your application may just be making good use of the M1 instruction set... both without knowing a bit more its difficult to tell.

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#9

Post by gjsman-1000 » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

al2o3cr wrote: post #3

don’t ask me how _You_ should be asking you how - there are lots of reasons why this could be happening and knowing which one is important if you're changing stuff. Based on a "highly parallelizable" application performing better on 8 cores than 32, I'd guess you're running out of something else: memory or disk bandwidth.

If his application is running better on 8 instead of 32, that reeks to me of a dependency on single-core performance somewhere. An example of this would be Minecraft, which performs worse on heavily-multi core systems compared to a few fast cores (like M1).

Re: Ask HN: Running production server on M1 mini?

#10

Post by groundthrower » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

No currently offered M1 Mini has redundant fail-over power or storage. Also, without knowing how your cloud provider has cooling setup it is unclear how well it will operate under heavy load for extended periods of time (blade servers are designed for that specific workload and have cooling solutions to match). My point is: If your workload is time critical, and you cannot afford downtime/outages then it may not be f…

Well, it waits for calculations which take about 2 seconds to complete on average - the vast majority of the time it’s idle