> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…
They may just be trying to express the thought that simpler code is both easier to understand and often more efficient. Don't forget Joel Spolsky's contributions to the effort; he's the one who coined the term "architecture astronaut".
"Stack Overflow still uses Microsoft products. Microsoft infrastructure works and is cheap enough, so there’s no compelling reason to change." <- there's your problem :-)
54th ranked site in the world with a small number of servers and apparently very maintainable and stable systems.
I'm grateful to them them for being so transparent about how their systems work. It's rare to get this level of detail on how a large, successful site operates.
> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…
Sometimes "efficient" and "easy to understand and be sure is correct" don't have to be mutually exclusive; see this example [1] of Java and Go.
Note that the code is autogenerated, so it should be equally efficient. The Go version also happens to be very simple and no different than most humans would write by hand (without trying very hard to optimize).
> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…
users=db.get("SELECT name FROM users WHERE group='admin'") is more efficient and understandable then: users=[]; tmp=db.get("SELECT name,group FROM users") for (i=0;i
But who in their right mind would do the second one?
Obviously you can make code both less efficient and less readable. But starting with code that a competent programmer has written, I find it seldom makes it more readable when you make it more efficient.
> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
384 gigs is pretty common these days. With Windows, you need at least the server edition to address that much, but if you're running a server, you're not gonna be using the desktop versions of the OS anyways. Pretty much everything else, it's just plug and play. The RAM is quite a bit if you're doing a typical cloud deployment, but SO seems to be more in the model of making sure all your eggs are in a really strong b…
> The cost of inefficient code can be higher than you think. Efficient code stretches hardware further, reduces power usage, makes code easier for programmers to understand. I'm curious what the reasoning is for "Efficient code ... makes code easier for programmers to understand". To my mind, efficient code (in this case, I assume coding to the hardware, as they mention elsewhere), has many benefits, but making it ea…
Sometimes "efficient" and "easy to understand and be sure is correct" don't have to be mutually exclusive; see this example [1] of Java and Go. Note that the code is autogenerated, so it should be equally efficient. The Go version also happens to be very simple and no different than most humans would write by hand (without trying very hard to optimize). [1] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL/9f94bbd021b4693cf584
I'm not disputing that efficient code can be easier to understand in some instances, just that the assertion that efficient code is easier to understand. Logically, disputing that just requires a single instance of efficient code that is hard to understand. I think that's a trivial enough example to be self evident. In reality, I'm just wondering what they were trying to convey with that statement. I doubt they would have written it without reason, so I'm curious to the reason.
> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
384 gigs is pretty common these days. With Windows, you need at least the server edition to address that much, but if you're running a server, you're not gonna be using the desktop versions of the OS anyways. Pretty much everything else, it's just plug and play. The RAM is quite a bit if you're doing a typical cloud deployment, but SO seems to be more in the model of making sure all your eggs are in a really strong b…
Not true. Windows 8.1 64 bit would be happy with that much.
Really hate the separate sites thing. I use a half dozen of them and they are computer related, so it is a pain in the ass always having to register and not being allowed to comment/answer at first, etc.. They have a few improvements now like importing your profile from other sites, but they shouldn't even have so many separate sites in the first place, just a tag or a category or something.
I agree. Diffuses the quality of the related sites. Means you have to deal with twice as many moderators. I dont see why they couldnt have done a "subreddit' approach where you subscribe to the SE category you want and it shows on your homepage.
> With their SQL Servers loaded with 384 GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, AWS would cost a fortune. I have next to zero experience with server administration, but 384GB seems like a lot to me. Is that common for production servers for popular web services? Do you need a customized OS to address that much memory? Seems like you'd really need to beef up the cache hierarchy make 0.38TB of RAM fast.
I don't believe that much RAM is uncommon for large scale database servers. 384GB RAM is only about $5000 from Dell. They also have a new server model coming out that supports up to 6TB of RAM [0]. [0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r920/pd
Most people over estimate hardware cost. Buying a 300-500GB ram server maybe very expensive. But buying a distributed data base expert likely costs at least an order of magnitude higher per year.