One more problem is cloud. We host on cloud. cloud service providers might be using old hardware. Newest hardware or specific OS might be winner but no options on cloud. How do you tackle that ?
The C10M problem
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: The C10M problem
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it's what used to be called 'craftsmanship'. Taking pride in creating things that are efficient and not wasteful for no other reason than the desire to make the best product possible.
It is wasteful to spend time doing something that benefits nobody, or where the benefits outweigh the cost. Your time is worth something.
I think the "just good enough for business" attitude contributed to the demise of the American car and the rise of the Japanese ones. The American tradition was to use engineering tolerances that would maximize throughput under the constraint that it produced a pretty functional car. The Japanese tradition on the other hand was to use tighter tolerances, well because there was room for tightening the tolerance. At the surface level, or the MBA level it seems that the Japanese way is just dumb. It does not make monetary sense when measured in sales per year. But it turns out that the benefits express themselves at a different timescale: better brand and a culture of devotion to improvement, rather than to being "just good enough to work so that I can move to the next thing".
Part of this applies to the craft of software too. One can be sloppy and churn out functional websites by the dozens. At the superficial level, the goal to extract the most from a 500MHX Pentium-III might seem brain dead, with little or no pay off. But it pays back by instilling an attitude of deeply learning your craft, that learning does pay back although that specific well tuned web server might not. You dont have to build all your servers that way, but if it doesnt hurt you a little when you know exactly what you could have done to extract some more juice out of it, you will not reach that level of understanding. If you are impatient or sloppy, you will build impatience into your product, and it will show.
Besides it is always easy to over value ones time, it sometimes correlates with conceit.
@sitkack what makes you think I was talking about the 50s. Going by the downvote I seem to have touched a nerve. You are right Japanese products around that time were synonymous with bad quality, not just in US. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.
Re: The C10M problem
#43On the one hand, I love this. There's an old-school, down-to-the-metal, efficiency-is-everything angle that resonates deeply with me. On the other hand, I worry that just means I'm old. There are a lot of perfectly competent developers out there that have very little idea about the concerns that motivate thinking like this C10M manifesto. I sometimes wonder if my urge toward efficiency something like my grandmother's…
It really just depends on how much of a computational surplus you have. Some tasks have become so incredibly easy relative to today's computational horsepower, that we can afford waste 90% of it if it means we can be 10% more productive. But this isn't true everywhere. Imagine if Google's servers cost 100x more to run, if they didn't spend time to make their code efficient. Imagine if your video games ran at a frame…
> when languages like Python and Ruby can be over 100x slower than other high level languages
You said a wrong thing. Java is a far cry from a high-level language.
Javascript is arguably a high-level language however, and meaningless benchmarks (aka "damn lies") attest V8 is in spitting distance of Java. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php
Scala is much higher level than Java, compiles to the same run-time, and is at rough parity. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/scala.php
Re: The C10M problem
#44"There is no way for the primary service (such as a web server) to get priority on the system, leaving everything else (like the SSH console) as a secondary priority" - Can't we use the nice command (nice +n command) when these process are started to change its priority? I am sorry if it is so naive question
Re: The C10M problem
#45It seems we've already passed this problem: "We also show that with Mio, McNettle (an SDN controller written in Haskell) can scale effectively to 40+ cores, reach a throughput of over 20 million new requests per second on a single machine, and hence become the fastest of all existing SDN controllers."[1] (reddit discussion at [2])
This new IO manager was added to GHC 7.8 which is due for final release very soon (currently in RC stage). That said, I'm not sure if it can be said if all (or even most) of the criteria have been met. But hey, at least they're already doing 20M connections per second.
[1] http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/hask03... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k6fsl/mio_a_highpe...
Re: The C10M problem
#46Isn't this more-or-less how mainframes work?
Re: The C10M problem
#47On the one hand, I love this. There's an old-school, down-to-the-metal, efficiency-is-everything angle that resonates deeply with me. On the other hand, I worry that just means I'm old. There are a lot of perfectly competent developers out there that have very little idea about the concerns that motivate thinking like this C10M manifesto. I sometimes wonder if my urge toward efficiency something like my grandmother's…
Is this kind of efficiency effectively obsolete for general-purpose programming?
I think it is obsolete in that area, and has been for years (decades? Unoptimized SQL is almost always slower than key-value stores). General purpose programming is really about meeting user & business requirements. Speed and ffficiency is a second level concern, which only becomes an issue when you don't have enough of it.
BUT efficiency is even more important now for systems-level program ("system" in the sense of building libraries for use by other systems, as opposed to user-facing).
A good example is SnappyLabs[1] who developed a faster JPEG encoder and ended up being a subject of a Google/Apple bidding war.
Re: The C10M problem
#48Just what are these resources that we are using more efficiently? CPU? RAM?
Are they that important? Should we not be trying to use electricity more efficiently since that is a real world consumable resource. How many connections can you handle per kilowatt hour?
Re: The C10M problem
#49On the one hand, I love this. There's an old-school, down-to-the-metal, efficiency-is-everything angle that resonates deeply with me. On the other hand, I worry that just means I'm old. There are a lot of perfectly competent developers out there that have very little idea about the concerns that motivate thinking like this C10M manifesto. I sometimes wonder if my urge toward efficiency something like my grandmother's…
I'm reminded of a recent article that crossed the front page of HN, about a group writing some sort of fluid layout engine for their mobile app. They were able to optimize it from tens of layouts to thousands of layout per second, which enabled their strategy of trying a bunch of different layouts and picking the best one. This wouldn't have been possible if they stuck with the naive solution. Making it fast enabled a new feature that simply couldn't exist with the slow solution.
Re: The C10M problem
#50Projects such as the Erlang VM running right on top of xen seem like promising initiatives to get the kind of performance mentioned ( http://erlangonxen.org/ ).
I wish they open sourced it and let others look at the code and experiment with it. For a lot of developers if it isn't open = it doesn't exist. Now it is their code and they do whatever they want but that is my view of the project.