From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-10-04T01:42:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Recent Criticism about Ruby (Scalability, etc.)

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 12:38:25AM +0900, MenTaLguY wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 00:19:40 +0900, benjohn@fysh.org wrote:
> >> Thank you!! It's about time somebody put a dollar figure on the cost of
> >> poor scalability and highlighted the nonsense of "adding servers is
> >> cheaper than hiring programmers." They are two entirely different
> >> economic propositions.
> > 
> > That's true. However, very roughly, compute resource can scale about
> > linearly with compute requirement.
> 
> What about Amdahl's law?

What about it?  Unless you're writing software that doesn't scale with
the hardware, more hardware means linear scaling, assuming bandwidth
upgrades.  If bandwidth upgrades top out, you've got a bottleneck no
amount of hardware purchasing or programmer time will ever solve.


>  
> > Alternatively, you can reduce the compute requirement by having a more
> > complex software system.
> 
> While it's true that very simple systems can perform badly because
> they use poor algorithms and/or do not make dynamic optimizations,
> more complex software generally means increased computational
> requirements.

I thought "complex" was a poor choice of term here, for the most part.
It was probably meant as a stand-in for "more work at streamlining
design, combined with greater code cleverness needs to scale without
throwing hardware at the problem."

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Leon Festinger: "A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him
you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions
your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."