131–140 of 164 posts
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That is indeed what I meant; with very little effort and not having much knowledge about database internals, you can save a ton of money. It won’t be perfect that way, but goes a long way vs no indices at all. So that’s why ‘no reason’. Aka very low hanging fruit. Sorry for not being clear and thanks for explaining.
No to mention adding an index is practically without risk, the outcome of queries is the same except probably faster.
I worked at a large valley based company that had their own data centers and badly wanted to decrease infra spend. It's WAY harder than it sounds. Remember Twitter is not a profitable company which means the likelihood of a bunch of low-hanging fruit for savings is very low. That's been done already. There are not likely "oh look we found a whole DC sitting idle, oops" sort of savings. Any vendors they use are ALREAD…
That's circular. Their revenue is astronomical. They're not profitable because they're spending it all. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of low hanging opportunities (or that there are).
Hidden recordings of twitter staff had the describing the places as more of a lifestyle business where profit isn't a major goal and many people worked very limited amounts. It could have been useless bluster but if there was any basis to it, it's a good indication that massive savings should be possible.
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There’s always a way to reduce costs. For storage specifically one could spend engineering time compressing data, storing it in a colder way, etc. The question is whether the trade offs, short term or long term, are worth it.
I'm pretty certain that Twitter's code is essentially append-only. It's possible to add new features and keep the old stuff running but there is no way to re-architect it to reduce costs. They are already compressing the data so there is no improvement to be gained there. As for cold storage, re-engineering backups and other forms of redundancy will reduce long-term costs but it won't reduce their yearly operating re…
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No, all-cash buyouts are also a thing.
This was an all-cash buyout. It does not mean it was not leveraged. All-cash buyouts are those buyouts where the acquirer pays with cash and not their own stock. In this case, Musk used only cash. But some of that cash (about $12.7 BN) was borrowed from banks. So, it was leveraged. In principle some buyer like Musk could buy without any help from banks, but why would they do that? You don't get to be a multi-billiona…
[0]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-stock-twitter-debt-51...
Everyone on the internet knows how to run Twitter better than the richest man on earth who revolutionized both the electric car and private space industries. I wish I could invest in Twitter now but I’ll wait for the cryptocurrency launch.
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I had a friend that worked for a massive company in the Valley which I'll leave unnamed, that told me about them just leaving servers running hot with no throughput for months at a time. So, I guess it's possible. I doubt his estimate was pulled out of a hat (but I could be wrong, or the article could just be pulling that out of a hat/using an unreliable source.) I've taken over AWS and Azure accounts before that wer…
Yep, same here; as a (well paid) hobby, I help smaller companies lower their software bills. When they use 'cloud hosting' instead of a vps or something, that's usually the first point where I can cut 80%+. It is crazy how many things are running there that are not used or needed in almost every company I see. Usually there are software issues (most commonly, no, not enough or plainly wrong db indexes being the #1 to…
They had some digging about, and it turned out that most of the FAANG guys would just write a test bit every XXX-1 sec. to keep the disk spinning. As it improved their internal metrics on 'up time' or whatever else they thought was important. So silly.
So, the manufacturer then wrote code to deal with that code to try to save the bearings. And soon enough that code was discovered, and more complicated code was made to keep the disk spinning no matter what.
And back and forth until my buddy retired and stopped caring about this strange little 'arms race'. I suppose it's still going on though.
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That is indeed what I meant; with very little effort and not having much knowledge about database internals, you can save a ton of money. It won’t be perfect that way, but goes a long way vs no indices at all. So that’s why ‘no reason’. Aka very low hanging fruit. Sorry for not being clear and thanks for explaining.
No to mention adding an index is practically without risk, the outcome of queries is the same except probably faster.
An index isn't free so you can impact the write performance, depending on the workload and usecases slower writes could have more of an impact than faster reads.
But even in a read heavy application it's possible that your databases query planner is "tricked" into using a specific index which can actually be slower than another (or even none) so you should always measure the impact that adding an index can have on your application.
$1bn, the exact amount of debt interest Twitter now has to pay off after Musk saddled it with so much debt. So much of this feels like such a waste. I don’t have any problem with the idea of someone taking Twitter private in order to fix it. But with this kind of debt financing and with a CEO that doesn’t seem to understand the company (and tried to get out of buying it)…
Why a waste? Sounds like a smart move? Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses.
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Yep, same here; as a (well paid) hobby, I help smaller companies lower their software bills. When they use 'cloud hosting' instead of a vps or something, that's usually the first point where I can cut 80%+. It is crazy how many things are running there that are not used or needed in almost every company I see. Usually there are software issues (most commonly, no, not enough or plainly wrong db indexes being the #1 to…
It's been a fun 'arms race' of sorts between hard-drive manufacturers and FAANG-esque coders. I have a friend that works for a very big hard-drive company. So, think very large data storage at scale. Well, they discovered that a fair bit of their spin-disk machines would get to the max rotation lifetimes with little reader-head arm movement. AKA, they were just run for months at a time without ever being really used.…
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> Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. Is this a good way of reasoning? If somebody said "frankly, if Bob stops wearing his seatbelt and doesn't die, a lot of people will look pretty stupid" we'd push back. Now the opposite is also not true, where if things go fine Musk is still an idiot. Only the people who know the internals of the system…
Except Twitter going down is not as serious as death. The answer to “How much $ is it worth to get an extra 9 of reliability?” is never “Infinite”. So, I agree with OP, if they can save a big chunk of their opex with a negligible decrease in reliability (measured by something like, how much user churn are we seeing as a result of the downtime), then it’s a good call. I don’t know enough about Twitter’s internals to g…
As users on the outside maybe we don't care so much, but internally Twitter has invested tremendous amounts of energy and brain power to make the service resilient and scalable over the past 12+ years.
When Twitter is down, it was taken quite seriously by those who worked there. I'm sure they did the blameless postmortem culture, the whole none yards.
Too much downtime and people will stop using it and / or migrate to a competitor, and then the service will be dead.