Live data from Hacker News

Why events are a bad idea for high-concurrency servers (2003) [pdf]

people.eecs.berkeley.edu

1–10 of 50 posts

Re: Why events are a bad idea for high-concurrency servers (2003) [pdf]

#2
Worth noting this is from 2003. The performance concerns of event-based servers have been greatly alleviated by both hardware and software advancements.

The test setup used for this paper was a "2x2000 MHz Xeon SMP with 1 GB of RAM running Linux 2.4.20". Solid PC server iron for 2003, but basically equivalent to a $5/month server from Digital Ocean today.

If you're looking to squeeze 100,000 concurrent tasks from that $5 server, this paper is relevant to you.

Re: Why events are a bad idea for high-concurrency servers (2003) [pdf]

#7

and then there was that just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165193

Haha I think that's the point of OP's post IMO, and people were even discussing this dichotomy in that thread as well.

Total gold, nothing in this world is clean or definitive.

Re: Why events are a bad idea for high-concurrency servers (2003) [pdf]

#8
A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548487

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7684163

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907415

Smaller but interesting threads from 2010-12:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3482002

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910849

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547353

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355309

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269090

Re: Why events are a bad idea for high-concurrency servers (2003) [pdf]

#9
post #2

Worth noting this is from 2003. The performance concerns of event-based servers have been greatly alleviated by both hardware and software advancements. The test setup used for this paper was a "2x2000 MHz Xeon SMP with 1 GB of RAM running Linux 2.4.20". Solid PC server iron for 2003, but basically equivalent to a $5/month server from Digital Ocean today. If you're looking to squeeze 100,000 concurrent tasks from tha…

> The performance concerns of event-based servers have been greatly alleviated by both hardware and software advancements.

Threads haven't exactly stood still in that time either, especially if you include green threads, fibers, coroutines, etc.

> If you're looking to squeeze 100,000 concurrent tasks from that $5 server, this paper is relevant to you.

It's relevant regardless, as part of a long-running back and forth between threads and events. For example, Eric Brewer was one of the co-authors of this paper, but also for the SEDA paper which was seminal in promoting event-based programming. I highly doubt that we've seen the last round of this, as technology on all sides continues to evolve, and context is a good thing to know. Those who do not learn the lessons of history...

Post reply on HN