Originally posted by BillT
View Post
Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Linux 5.15 Addressing Scalability Issue That Caused Huge IBM Servers 30+ Minutes To Boot
Collapse
X
-
I'm curious: What is the point of systems like this? Why not go for a cluster of cheaper servers? My (limited) understanding is that that is what companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc do.
Unless you really need 64 TB ram on a single CPU, why not split it across multiple machines and design around that? After all, those companies I mentioned above also manage extremely impressive uptimes.
Comment
-
Originally posted by Vorpal View PostI'm curious: What is the point of systems like this? Why not go for a cluster of cheaper servers?
And IMO distributed systems are often overrated/overused. A cluster is hard to develop for and hard to manage. And when things go wrong, hard to find bottlenecks, hard to fix then, hard to recover from failures. Also, when network latency kicks in or the cluster software isn't done 100% right, some problems might need a LOT of machines in a cluster to achieve satisfactory performance. And then depending on the cluster size, it might end up more expensive than a single machine. Besides, if you factor in the development/maintenance cost for a cluster vs 1 machines (say with another hot spare), you might end up with a total cost that is significantly more expensive.
My advice- if you don't need massive horizontal scalability, and if you don't need massive reliability- don't develop distributed systems.
- Likes 3
Comment
-
Originally posted by indepe View PostI'd guess being able to boot a mainframe with "several hundred CPUs and 64TB of RAM" in under 5 minutes is quite an achievement, though. (Without knowing how long other OS's would take...)
Originally posted by pipe13First show me another vendor with 5 nines availability.
Comment
-
Originally posted by coder111 View Post
Depends on your problem. Sometimes you need low latency random access on 64 TB of data...
And IMO distributed systems are often overrated/overused. A cluster is hard to develop for and hard to manage. And when things go wrong, hard to find bottlenecks, hard to fix then, hard to recover from failures. Also, when network latency kicks in or the cluster software isn't done 100% right, some problems might need a LOT of machines in a cluster to achieve satisfactory performance. And then depending on the cluster size, it might end up more expensive than a single machine. Besides, if you factor in the development/maintenance cost for a cluster vs 1 machines (say with another hot spare), you might end up with a total cost that is significantly more expensive.
My advice- if you don't need massive horizontal scalability, and if you don't need massive reliability- don't develop distributed systems.- There are other types of distributed systems, not just for data centres. I have worked on development for distributed systems in embedded applications. One example is the CAN bus in a modern car with many attached microcontrollers. Another case I also worked on was multiple communicating robots. Both of these have very different requirements than the data centre case, but are considered distributed systems. I suspect that you were considering a much narrower scope, but correct definitions and terminology is important.
- Even horizontal scaling is relatively easy if done well, with an environment built for that. Consider Erlang, which I have used in a horizontal scaling situation. Thanks to the functional message passing programming paradigm and the OTP libraries, horizontal scaling comes almost for free. Reliability (while not quite as easy) is also greatly simplified.
- Likes 3
Comment
-
Originally posted by MadeUpName View PostIBM isn't the only company in the world that makes big ass severs. Until you show me another vendor with similar problems I blame IBM.
- Likes 2
Comment
-
Originally posted by sinepgib View Post
A fix got accepted into the kernel, which means maintainers considered there actually was something wrong with it, so I guess they already accepted Linux is not perfect. As no other OS is either. So you're wrong.
Comment
Comment