211–220 of 225 posts
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Direct point to point conduits carrying fiber would reduce latency to a worst case of 21ms, but requires a fiber that doesn't melt at core temps (around 5200C).
Is it easy to dig down to the core, apart from the temperature issues?
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Oh 7200 drives are used. Mainly for large data storage. If you deal with high quality videos (RAW 4K or 8K), SSDs are way too expensive to store them.
GP was likely refering to extraordinary disks with more than 7200 rpm
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I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw…
Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How wou…
I absolutely notice a pretty major difference. If you don't - hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it I guess.
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I'm talking about back in the day when I worked at Amazon with thousands of servers and in the 2001-2006 era we had basically no SSDs and it was all spinny rust (set the slider to 2006 and that is about my mental model). Spinny rust was always shit, so it was all about RAM and network and then the long tail siting on disk. I'm wondering how datacenter SSDs impact architectural decisions with e.g. 'microservices' by h…
Oh, SSDs have definitely had a big impact. On a cost per iop basis, they've been faster for a while, so any workload that's iop limited is on SSDs these days (assuming it doesn't fit in ram). Re your prior comment about Redis style caches, it's worth noting Memcached now supports an SSD optimized external store. It identifies values where it'd be beneficial to spill them to SSD and does so, holding metadata in ram su…
Bit surprised that isn't already much more common of a pattern.
And yeah, I'm a fan of sqlite whenever it can be used, then postgresql when you need some beefier.
A frightening about of Amazon ran on pre-chewed-up BDBs that were pushed out to every server that needed them (originally to literally every webserver, then pushed out to every server in a microservice cluster), effectively as caches in front of SQL databases. Using sqlite these days should be much better than that since BDBs were buggy and awful.
The "commodity network" thing is kind of weird. I'd expect that to make a 10x jump when switches went from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit (mid-late 2000s?) and then nothing. I certainly don't feel like they've been smoothly increasing in speed year after year. I'm also curious about those slow 1990s SSDs.
I was curious too, the network one is a TODO: https://github.com/colin-scott/interactive_latencies/blob/ma... Although I'd expect more jumps than Fast Ethernet to Gigabit, it's true the consumer space is kind of stuck on Gigabit (with 2.5 GbE just becoming more common now). Datacenters have had at least 10 GbE for many years.
I thought about this some more and it might be referring to WiFi speeds. Those have been steadily increasing over time with the transition from 802.11b networks of old to modern WiFi 6. Of course WiFi only became a thing in the very late 90s/early 2000s.
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Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How wou…
Alright, fair enough - we might just have fairly different workloads. I absolutely notice a pretty major difference. If you don't - hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it I guess.
But, random access reads of many small files scattered across the disc, obviously SSD will do much better. Sequential reads (large files, non-fragmented filesystem) it's not so clear.
Maybe it's simply that Linux, as well as being better at file caching and not wasting RAM, is also better at not being fragmented. Perhaps I have my OS filesystems to thank for my indifference.
On that front I guess it's also saving me money by allowing me to enjoy ginormous cheap discs :)
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The great circle distance between SF and Amsterdam is about 5,450 miles. A round trip is 10,900 miles. At the speed of light, that's 58.5 milliseconds. So in theory, infinitely efficient computers (and some sort of light-in-a-vacuum wire) and networking equipment could knock 60% off that time, but no more. However, I suspect one big problem is that there are a number of hops between the Netherlands and San Francisco.…
> I'm curious what the actual route is be and how many miles are involved. There’s tons of possible routes, but here is a probable one: SFO -> NJ -> UK -> NL -> AMS = ~6,250mi one way minimum GC distance, probably closer to 7k-7,500mi in reality The majority of transatlantic landings are along the Jersey shore, but could also be Long Island, NY, or Boston / Virginia Beach vicinity too.
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Alright, fair enough - we might just have fairly different workloads. I absolutely notice a pretty major difference. If you don't - hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it I guess.
As I think about this, maybe it really is a Windows vs Linux thing. On raw read speeds, SSD is only about 2-3x faster than HDD. This is barely noticeable compared to the speed from RAM, or for almost anything you could reasonably launch. (Videos are huge, but those are basically streamed anyway) But, random access reads of many small files scattered across the disc, obviously SSD will do much better. Sequential reads…
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The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running for 23 days. Booting takes ~15 seconds even on spinning rust for a reasonable linux distro, so I'm not going to stress about those 15 seconds every couple of months. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 4.6Gi 21Gi 158Mi 5.1Gi 25Gi Swap: 37Gi 617M…
Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.