Finishing out the 4.10 merge window [LWN.net]

Finishing out the 4.10 merge window

Posted Jan 7, 2017 19:44 UTC (Sat) by davidstrauss (guest, #85867)
In reply to: Finishing out the 4.10 merge window by zlynx
Parent article: Finishing out the 4.10 merge window

It's not only a matter of faster processors. There's power efficiency, storage, networking, memory, and other aspects that will also be limited in a 2008 chipset and build.

to post comments

Finishing out the 4.10 merge window

Posted Jan 7, 2017 19:55 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Yes true. Mostly about the power efficiency but that extra cost has to balance against replacing all of the hardware you've currently got.

Networking and storage in servers in my experience is mostly about the latency. It does depend on the application and perhaps you really do have a difference between 1 Gbps and 40 Gbps to the SAN, but for most things it is database indexing and record retrieval which takes the same number of milliseconds no matter how fast the link is.

And of course bigger faster RAM is nice and it is pretty great to get 256 GB on one node these days. But if you're using a multiple-terabyte sized database your cache hit rate isn't going to be *that* much better. Depends on the application.

So, I think it can be a reasonable decision to keep using old systems as long as they are performing well enough and the maintenance costs are lower than replacement costs.