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The future calculus of memory managementThe future calculus of memory managementPosted Jan 19, 2012 12:32 UTC (Thu) by mlankhorst (subscriber, #52260)Parent article: The future calculus of memory management
Is memory really that expensive? For 100$ I can just buy 16G, I suspect for most people it would be cheaper in productivity to add more ram instead of the production loss you get from not having enough ram.
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The future calculus of memory management Posted Jan 19, 2012 14:32 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
But then scale that for google. Even for small server farms of a hundred servers, that's $10K. Anyone can think of things more useful for $10K when most of the RAM bought is unused most of the time.
The future calculus of memory management Posted Jan 19, 2012 15:44 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> Is memory really that expensive? For 100$ I can just buy 16G, I suspect for most people it would be cheaper in productivity to add more ram instead of the production loss you get from not having enough ram.
It is not just the price of the memory stick. It also uses more power. You might need a more expensive server with more memory slots. It is one more piece of hardware which can fail and need to be replaced.
On the software side, the operating system has to use more memory to track all the available pages, and on 32-bit architectures this memory might have to be in the very valuable low memory area (below the 4G limit). Your memory management algorithms might also need more time to manage all these pages.
The future calculus of memory management Posted Jan 19, 2012 16:53 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
4G of RAM is not a lot. Unless you have hundreds or thousands of nodes.
I'm working with genomic data and some of our workloads are "spiky". They usually tend to require 2-3GB of RAM and can easily fit on Amazon EC2 "large" nodes. But sometimes they might require more than 10Gb of RAM which requires quite more powerful (and expensive!) nodes. You really start appreciating RAM usage when you're paying for it by hour (I think I now understand early mainframe programmers).
I've cobbled together a system which uses checkpointing to move workloads across nodes in case of danger of swapping. It works, but I'd really like ability to 'borrow' extra RAM for short periods.
The future calculus of memory management Posted Jan 19, 2012 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
If you cannot use the memory in your current machine, then the price goes up to that of a whole new system.
There are many old machines out there that do not support more than 2 or 4 GB. Many of those machines are in production environments, and are not going to be replaced any time soon for multiple reasons, including the cost of retesting, downtime, and current buying policies.
The future calculus of memory management Posted Jan 20, 2012 8:05 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Purchasing ram for a single machine is cheap. But if you've got a million machines, then investing another $100 in each of them, still costs you one hundred million dollars.
Which means it's worth it to spend a lot of programming-hours, even for just a modest decrease in this. A single percentage reduction in memory-consumption, is worth a million dollars.
Lots of stuff is worth it at large scale, even if at small scale it doesn't matter. If you're a small company owning a dozen servers, then in 99% of the cases it'll be cheaper to just throw more ram at them, than to spend programmer-time reducing the memory-footprint of the applications.
If you've got a million servers, the math looks different.
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