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."

Comments

Huge ebay hole

[Anonymous Coward]

For sale

What does ebay do anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

What on earth does Ebay do? I mean they have no logistics, no inventory to manage. Its mostly people posting items, and managing the progress of a whole lot of auctions. There are some financial and anti-fraud measures on the backend...but give me a break.

Ebay hearts java and I think it is the use of slow ass languages and crappy programmers that makes having soo many systems necessary.

I would be very surprised if a handful of quad core PCs you can pick up at your nearest electronic store would not be capable of handling all of ebays transactional requirements if written properly.