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eBay Makes Huge Gains In Parallel Efficiency
CurtMonash writes "Parallel Efficiency is a simple metric that divides the actual work your parallel CPUs do by the sum of their total capacity. If you can get your parallel efficiency up, it's like getting free servers, free floor space, and some free power as well. eBay reports that it amazed even itself by increasing overall PE from 50% to 80% in about 6 months — across tens of thousands of servers. The secret sauce was data warehouse-based analytics. I.e., eBay instrumented its own network to do minute-by-minute status checks, then crunched the resulting data to find bottlenecks that needed removing. Obviously, savings are in the many millions of dollars. eBay has been offering some glimpses into its analytic efforts this year, and the PE savings are one of the most concrete examples they're offering to validate all this analytic cleverness."
Huh, that should hopefully make their stock price go up a little bit. Whatever mitigates the financial crisis is great...
Kudos to them for taking the initiative to be more efficient rather than to just buy more servers to increase capacity. On a side note, I wonder if this makes their servers able to process their data faster... If so, it means more getting sniped (and possibly snipers getting sniped) for the average joe.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
With the extra millions saved, they are going to lower their fees...as well as spend some time trying to figure out how to quit pissing everyone off...right?
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
WOW, way to go IT techs for ebay! I find it fascinating reading articles on the removal of bottle necks. Its interesting the tools and methods that are used to monitor specific parts of the company's IT System (servers, network, applications and more).
It is interesting how one bottle neck is overcome only to find yet another bottleneck. Very cool.
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Looks a little worn out and used to me. Is the price negotiable?
Today, ebay announced that it obtained a patent on using warehouse-based analytics to increase parallel efficiency in server operations.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
That is an impressive gain eBay received through those analytics. I have to wonder, though, why it took so long for their network team to remove bottlenecks. Was there some breakthrough technology that just recently allowed for this kind analysis, or were the engineers lazy all these years?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
I can imagine this: Some eBay hotshot comes up and says: "we only use 50% of our servers, we've got to do better here". So:
1) They don't buy new servers. Workload increases, better utilization, no analytics involved.
2) Or, someone got clever, and added an idling process to each idle server. Presto, we've improved our PE -- and we've got a nice yearly bonus as well.
The article actually says nothing, besides claiming a supposed 1.6x improvement, besides a very vauge refrence to analytics. This ./ post is actually meant to promote www.xlmpp.com.
Right now is the time to soothe investor fears caused by their recent tapping of a $1 Billion line of credit..
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE49G7L420081017
Analyst forecast lower revenue for Ebay in coming quarters, DOH.
http://tinyurl.com/5e69mt
...and Paypal makes all your transactions safe and worry free.
Pull the other one.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The erlang programming model makes it very easy to write applications that scale to "n" cores!
Is xlmpp.com a site for three egoists to drown in their own self promotion?
eBay today isn't the same type of place as 6 months ago. So much has changed; it's essentially a just facade of its former self.
eBay sellers have been leaving in droves, and there have been more glitches, some quite serious, on both eBay and PayPal lately.
It would have been more interesting to see such an article discussing parallel efficiency gain at say Amazon or some other large retailer whose business model / activity level had remained similar during the time period being measured.
Ron
Yes, we know eBay is trying to boost it's stock value and xlmpp.com wants more traffic.
Tag it what it is an move on. There's not much real info here.
The government can't save you.
They talk about improving efficiencies, 1.6X etc, but ok so what got improved?
What interesting things did they learn? What were they doing wrong before and what did they change?
I don't see any hard facts or much useful info.
Car analogy: it's like Ford says we've improved engine efficiencies 1.6X.
But you don't even get new MPG figures, no comparison of 0-60 before and after (to show whether there was any impact on performance), no torque curves, not even a mention of "high intensity electric fields reducing viscosity".
So to me it's as good as some PR firm bullshit and should not be on Slashdot.
Heck it's about as much useful news as programmer productivity improving because Slashdot went down for a day.
Actually they use Teradata... which has always been parallel everything... disclosure -I work for Teradata and "would know!"
This means the scammers can rip buyers off even more efficiently. Good job, eBay!
This of course explains why eBay fees have increased yet again - as sellers we're paying for increased eBay efficiency meaning that we will get higher prices for our stuff and will not be answered by a useless eBay tosser after sitting in a call queue for 30 minutes.
Cool!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's called self-optimizing. All companies and governments should use it. It is how the Japanese have excelled in autos, electronics, cameras, etc. A few US companies like Harley-Davidson use it, and of course, Linux and GNU development are examples of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming/
I mean, they're already increasing the "parallel efficiency" of their human workforce.
Servers of the world, unite!
They have just successfully raised their PE simply by sending their per share stock price from 32 to 16. What an achievement!
After all, with all the stolen goods from TSA showing up on eBay, it makes sense that they'd need to beef up their servers. :3
~ C.
"The secret sauce was data warehouse-based analytics. I.e., eBay instrumented its own network to do minute-by-minute status checks, then crunched the resulting data to find bottlenecks that needed removing."
Performing this number-crunching on idle CPUs/cores is responsible for 90% or more of the improvement from 50% to 80% Parallel Efficiency?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
It's just free advertising for the corporation mentioned in the second link with no useful information, ie no "News for Nerds", about the process they used beyond the vague "data warehouse" in the summary. If /. was always like this, everybody would stop reading the articles.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
They managed to squeeze in another 1U server on top of their existing boxes.
eBay has been pissing people off for years, but the main problem is that a functioning marketplace requires a critical mass of buyers and sellers, and none of the competitors (e.g. Yahoo Auctions) have managed to build nearly enough of a critical mass. Just about the only exceptions are in product-specific areas, for example eBay has never really owned the used book market, where Amazon Marketplace et al do a brisk business.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It goes to the highest bidder
No matter what, but by saving some power they are doing good for all of us by reducing their energy consumption footprints for better environment. It is not necessary to always have benefit from what you do.. selfish hunters.. think outside of well..
If you actually look for where the performance bottlenecks are and remove them, you get better efficiency. Who would ever have guessed?