News - Facebook thinks server-makers ?don?t get it?

[HEXUS]

Top Facebook techie Jonathan Heiliger says OEMs are doing it wrong and is disappointed with latest Intel and AMD CPUs.

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[aidanjt]

How utterly unspecific, and unhelpful.

[Arthran]

To me that sounded like:
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Our badly writen code/horrible applications don't run twice as fast when we get a 10% faster CPU!"

Could just be my ingrained loathing of facebloat

[aidanjt]

To me that sounded like:
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Our badly writen code/horrible applications don't run twice as fast when we get a 10% faster CPU!"

Exactly. They can't just throw bigger/faster multicore/multithreaded CPUs at a half-assed PHP application and expect a massive performance increase with zero effort on their part. They need to optimise both their app, and infrastructure if they want real performance gains.

[Singh400]

"Top Facebook techie Jonathan Heiliger"

Who? l2c (learn to code )

[Funkstar]

Heiliger saved his best broadside for the OEMs and server makers in the audience. "You guys don't get it," he denounced

To me it sounds like FB just order servers from a catalogue.

Do what Google do and cosy up to some manufacturers, not some OEMs. Then you can get your own systems built. This has been covered extensively in recent months.

[nichomach]

In the vein of "failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine" with a side-order of Zuckerberg:

Intel + AMD: "Failure of your crappy little piece of bloatware to scale is not our problem. Bitch."

edit: and Funkstar's right; they should be going down the Google root of getting custom-built half-depth pizza boxes designed to integrate into a custom power and cooling infrastructure.

[aidanjt]

Do what Google do and cosy up to some manufacturers, not some OEMs. Then you can get your own systems built. This has been covered extensively in recent months.

Yup, that too. But I can't see failbook being able to manage or develop for a real server farm anyway.

[TheAnimus]

Can't think why PHP based system would be getting vexed with current trends in CPUs?

They are very limited to prodecdurally explaing the solution, as a result, parrallization isn't a fun task to do. As a result i understand where he is coming from. But he is still space cadet.

[scaryjim]

If he's really worried about the power consumption of the facebook server farm, he could always migrate to Atom Z-series processors...

[Moby-Dick]

Exactly. They can't just throw bigger/faster multicore/multithreaded CPUs at a half-assed PHP application and expect a massive performance increase with zero effort on their part. They need to optimise both their app, and infrastructure if they want real performance gains.

It does sound like a lot of the app teams I have to support

[aidanjt]

It does sound like a lot of the app teams I have to support

That does not suprise me in the least. CS grads actually get pumped out of university with that mentality drilled into them.

[nichomach]

It does sound like a lot of the app teams I have to support

I remember a department of a company that I used to work for that was supposed to be developing software that used Oracle as an underlying database. They didn't like the IT department much, basically because they kept screwing their machines up and then having to ask us to fix them; if I tell you that these losers hard-coded IP addresses into their software, that'll probably give you the idea... So they bought a flashy multiprocessor SPARC box to run Oracle on, and a copy of Oracle. With a single processor license. And then wondered why it didn't work very well. And got very cross when things were explained to them, along with a suggestion that if they'd asked us in the first place, then... They had "issues" with scalability as well...

[scaryjim]

They had "issues" with scalability as well...

I don't think scalability was their biggest issue...

[Hicks12]

Sounds silly because amd and intel have both had big jumps in performance for cpu's, intels uses more power but is the fastest with AMD being hugely efficient in power usage and a bit slower. Alot of the time software is the issue so they should sort it out on their end first then have a go at amd/intel not the other way around.

[aidanjt]

Oh, and I also very much look forward to the day that Failbook uses SSDs on their database servers. Please, go right ahead, right now in fact. The sooner the better.

It's about the only thing that will make me love JMicron controllers.