Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)

Post by joslin01 » Wed, Jun 08, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #43

joslin01 wrote: post #33

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I talked to a CTO once that said he brought his RoR fleet down from 60 servers to 6-8 by switching to Scala.

I was once involved in a large-scale government project that rewrote a Java app to RoR. They went from 50 servers to 10. It has probably got more to do with the rewrite and the new architecture than whatever language it was written in.

Post by mrep » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 12:00 AM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #32

sigusr1 wrote: post #25

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If you haven't seen stackoverflows server architecture posts you'd probably enjoy them: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... I still think containers are great, and I really like the abstractions kubernetes provides, but if I ever had enough traffic to worry about scaling, I envision running a small cluster of very powerful computers rather than 100s of weak ones.

So basically, through careful engineering, they can run stackoverflow.com, one of the top-ten sites in the world, on a single web server and a single database server. Beefy machines for sure, but it kind of takes the air out of the web-scale hype balloon.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #74

joslin01 wrote: post #71

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What? It absolutely has to do with the language. Ruby binary trees: 57 seconds Scala binary trees: 11 seconds [1] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/ruby.html [2] - http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/scala.html

That would mean something if Ruby apps are 100% Ruby and/or are performing binary tree operations all the time, or doing similar kinds of CPU-intensive operations as depicted in the alioth benchmarks. But they don't. Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. A lot of expensive things are offloaded to C libraries. Things like XML parsing are offloaded to native libraries like libxml; n…

Post by FooBarWidget » Wed, Jun 15, 2016, 9:05 AM UTC

igouy wrote: post #76

FooBarWidget wrote: post #74

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That would mean something if Ruby apps are 100% Ruby and/or are performing binary tree operations all the time, or doing similar kinds of CPU-intensive operations as depicted in the alioth benchmarks. But they don't. Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. A lot of expensive things are offloaded to C libraries. Things like XML parsing are offloaded to native libraries like libxml; n…

>> Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. string manipulation http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes... memory allocation http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes... I/O fasta, fasta-redux, reverse-complement write 250MB regex-dna reads 50MB; k-nucleotide, reverse-complement read 250MB >> …offloaded to native libraries… So the alioth benchm…

Post by FooBarWidget » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

igouy wrote: post #78

FooBarWidget wrote: post #77

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> string manipulation That benchmark performs string manipulations that rarely occur in web apps. Web apps need: concatenation, substring, find/replace, maybe with regexps. All of those are implemented in C. > memory allocation Web apps don't tend to implement entire trees in pure Ruby. That benchmark is completely non-representative of real-world performance. What exactly are you getting at? Of course it's easy to f…

> Web apps need: concatenation, substring, find/replace, maybe with regexps. All of those are implemented in C. join and gsub? http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes... > Web apps don't tend to implement entire trees in pure Ruby. Nor do other apps but that is what Hans Boehm came up with as a simple GC benchmark. http://hboehm.info/gc/gc_bench/ > What exactly are you getting at? You don't seem…