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Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive
Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins:
"Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."
Sure, right now it may be more expensive to hire better developers.
But just wait a couple more months when unemployment starts hitting double digits. You'll be able to pick up very good, experienced developers for half, maybe a third of their current salaries.
Sure, invest in some HW now. That stuff will always be handy. But don't just go off and assume that developers will be expensive forever.
Recently my boss reviewed my schematic and asked me to replace 1% resistors with 2 or 5% "because they are cheaper". Yes true, but I spend most of the day doing that, so he spent about $650 on the task, thereby spending MORE not less.
So yeah I agree with the article that's it's often cheaper to specify faster hardware, or more-expensive hardware, than to spend hours-and-hours on expensive engineers/programmers trying to save pennies.
Or as Benjamin Franklin said, "Some people are penny-wise, but pound foolish." You try to save pennies and waste pounds/dollars instead.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
"10,000! We could almost buy our own ship for that!" "Yeah, but who's going to fly it kid? You?"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html
Give the person who actually wrote the article the ad revenue rather than this bottom feeding scum.
With cheep hardware readily available, I agree that, for many projects, it makes no sense to spend lots of time optimizing for performance. When faced with this situation, I optimize instead for readability and easy debugging, at the expense of performance.
But, and this is a big but, fast hardware is no excuse for sloppy, bloated code. Bad code is bad code, no matter how fast the hardware. Bad code is hard to debug, and hard to understand.
Unfortunately, bad or lazy programmers, combined with clueless managers fail to see the difference. They consider good design to be the same as optimization, and argue that both are unnecessary.
I believe the proper balance for powerful hardware is well thought out, clean unoptimized code.
Toss as much CPU and memory as you want at a chatty transaction and you won't solve the problem. What about the cost of your 2000 users of the application that wander off to the coffee machine while they wait for an hour glass to relinquish control to them? Over the years I have seen wanton ignorance from programmers that ought to know better about efficiency, scalability and performance.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
From someone who has been there, done that. I can say that throwing hardware at a problem rarely works.
If nothing else, faster hardware tend to increase the advantage of good algorithms over poorer ones.
Say I have an alghorithm who runs at O(N) and another one functionally equivalent that runs at O(N^2). Now let's say that you need to double the size of the input keeping the execution time constant. For the first algorithm you will need a machine which is 2X faster than the current one, for the second O(N^2) you'll need a 10X times faster machine.
Let's not forget that you need not only things to run fast, but to run correctly, and the absurdity of choosing less skilled programmers with more expensive hardware will become painfully evident.
PS: Sorry for the typos and other errors: english is not my native language, and I've got a bit too much beer last night.
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This only works for certain cases. Some your problems are too many orders of magnitude too big to throw hardware at them.
Before you do anything: Profile, analyze, understand.
It might be useless to spend a month of development effort on a problem that you can solve by upgrading the hardware. It's also useless to spend the money on new hardware and the administrator time setting it up and migrating programs and data, when you could've just known that wouldn't have helped in the first place.
Two questions I used to ask when giving talks: "Okay, who here has used a profiler? [hands go up] Now who has never been surprised by the results? [almost no hands]"
Before you spend money or expend effort, just take some easy steps to make sure you're not wasting it. Common sense.
In a lot of big orgs it is amazing how expensive it can be to upgrade your hardware, or add to an existing farm. Not because of the hardware cost, but because of all the overhead involved in designing/specifying the setup,ordering, waiting for it to come, getting space for it, installation, patching, backing up, etc.
In fact I've seen several orgs where the cost of a "Virtual Server" is almost as much as a physical one because the cost of all this servicing it is so high. Whether or not this is necessary I don't want to debate here, but it is undeniably the case.
So I think the case for throwing hardware at issues is not as clear cut as this article implies.
For pure CPU driven applications, I would agree with this statement. But NONE of the business applications I write are bogged down by CPUs. They are bogged down by I/O, either user uploads/downloads, network, or disk access.
I have yet to see any application that was fixed for good by throwing hardware at it. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid and the problem fixed. Someone improved response time by putting in a new server?? Does that mean they had web/app/database/data all on one machine?? Bad, bad, BAD design for large applications, no where to grow. At least if it's tiered and using a SAN with optical channels more servers can be added. Sometimes, more, not faster is better. And resources can be shared to make optimal use out of the servers that are available.
The FIRST step is to determine WHY something is slow. Is it memory, cpu, or I/O bound. That doesn't take a rocket scientist, looking at sar in Unix or Task Mangager in Windows can show you that. Sure, if it's CPU bound, buying faster CPUs will fix it.
The comment about developers having good boxes isn't the same as for applications. My latest job gives every developer a top-notch box with two monitors, I was in heaven. Unfortunately, it can't stop there. I also need development servers with disk space and memory to test large data sets BEFORE they go into production.
Setting expectations is the best way to manage over optimization. Don't say "I need a program to do this", state "I need a program to do this work in this time frame". It is silly to make a daily batch program that takes 2 minutes run 25% faster. But it's not silly to make a web page respond in under 2 secs., or a 4 hour batch job to run in 3 *if* it is needed. But without the expectation, there is no starting or stopping point. Most developers will state "it's done" when the right answer comes out the other end, while a few may continue to tune it until it's dead.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I almost feel an order of magnitude more stupid for reading that article. Throwing more hardware at a problem definitely makes more sense for a small performance issue, but this is rarely the case. The whole idea makes me sick as a developer. This reminds me of the attitude of many developers of a certain web framework out there. Instead of fixing real problems, they cover up fatal flaws in their architecture with a hardware band aid. There's no denying it can work sometimes, but at quite a high cost and completely inappropriate for some systems. Not everyone is just building a stupid to-do-list with a snappy name application.
Consider that many performance problems graphically have an upper limit. At some point throwing more hardware at the problem is going to do absolutely nothing. Further, the long term benefit of hardware is far less than the potential future contributions of a highly paid, skilled programmer.
Another issue is there are plenty of performance problems I have seen that cannot be scaled easily just by adding more hardware. A classic example are some RDBMS packages with certain applications. Often databases can be scaled vertically (limited by RAM and IO Performance), but not horizontally because of problems with stale data, replication, application design, etc. A programmer can fix these issues so that you can yes then add more hardware, but it is far more valuable in the long-term to have someone to enable you to grow in this way properly.
Actually fixing an application is a novel idea, don't you think? If my air conditioning unit is sometimes not working, I don't go and install two air conditioning units. I either fix the existing one or rip it out and replace it.
Further, there are plenty of performance problems that can never be solved with hardware. Tight looping is one that I often see. It does not matter what you throw at it, the system will be eaten. Another example is a garbage collection issue. Adding more hardware may help, but typically delays the inevitable. Scaling horizontally in this case would do next to nothing because if every user hits this same problem, you have not exactly bought more time (therefore you must go vertically as well, only really delaying the problem).
The mentality of this article may be innocent in some ways, but it reminds me of this notion that IT people are resources and not actual humans. Creativity, future productivity, problem solving skills, etc are far more valuable to any decent company than a bunch of hardware that is worthless in a few months and just hides piss poor work by the existing employees.
I feel like a return to the .com bubble and F'd Company. I am sure plenty of companies following a lot of this advice can look forward to articles about their own failures. If someone proposes adding hardware for a sane reason, say to accommodate a few thousands more visitors with some more load balanced servers, by all means do so. If your application just sucks and you need to add more servers to cover up mistakes, it is time to look elsewhere because your company is a WTF.
Surely that might work for a one-off, but if you're selling millions or even thousands of copies of your software, even a $100 increase in hardware requirements costs the economy millions. Just because it doesn't cost YOU millions doesn't mean you don't see the cost.
If your customers are spending millions on hardware, that money is going to the hardware vendors, not to you. And more importantly, that money represents wasted effort. Effort that could otherwise be used to increase real wealth, thus making the dollars you do earn more valuable.
So i guess the lesson is, If you're CERN, throw hardware at it. If you're Adobe, get a lot of good programmers/architects.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And at least one skilled person from that era in a leadership position made this tradeoff with significant economic -- as well as entertaining and educational -- consequences.
Well, unless the $8/hr is an introductory rate (that is, the first 200 hrs are at $8.50, then after that you go up to $15 or $20/hr), you could do better by joining a construction site. At our place (prestress, precast concrete plant), we are paying warm bodies $10/hr.
Show that you can read drawings, and you can quickly rise up to $12-$14/hr. Which is, admittedly, a pittance, but if you live in a trailer home, you can make ends meet. Then you can still program in your spare time, and keep the rights to your work, to boot.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
When I was young, eager and naive I worked at a place that was doing some pretty heavyweight simulations which took a good three-four days on a (I think) quad-processor Sun box.
It was quite a big site and had a relatively high turnover of decent hardware. Next to the IT support team's area was a room about 6 yards by 10 yards almost full to the ceiling with older monitors, printers and a shitload of commodity PC's. And I'd just stated reading about mainstream acceptance of linux clustering for paralellizable apps.
Cue the lightbulb winking into life above my head!
I approached my boss, with the idea to get those old boxes working again as a cluster and speed things up for the modelling team. He was quite interested and said he'd look into it. He fired up Excel and started plugging in some estimates...
Later that day I saw him and asked him what he thought. He shook his head. "It's a non-starter" he said. Basically, if the effort involved in getting a cluster up and working - including porting of apps - was more than about four man-weeks, it's cheaper and a lot safer just to dial up the Sun rep, invoke our massive account (and commensurate discount) with them and buy a beefier model from the range. And the existing code would run just fine with no modifications.
A useful lesson for me in innovation risk and cost.
Political language
"Natalie Portman can't act for shit and she has the tits of an 11-year old girl. Grits are bland and best served to the inbred, down-syndrome-afflicted inhabitants of the Southern United States."
OK, OK, ya got me horny, hungry, and nostalgic for the folks back home, but what was your point?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
that's the point - they DO get off on it!
As for the rest, if you REALLY want to improve productivity:
The real productivity killers are poor morale, poor management, poor communications, poor specifications, poor research, lack of time for testing, lack of time for documenting, lack of time for "passing on knowledge" to other people, etc. Not hardware.
Yes, hardware IS cheap. Poor management is the killer - in every field. Just ask anyone who has been on a death march project. Or bought GM stock a year ago. Or who supported John McCain, then watched Sarah Palin become his "bimbo eruption." They all have one thing in common - people who thought they knew better, didn't do their research properly, and then screwed the pooch.
Andy Hertzfeld, engineer on the original Macintosh team:
Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know, how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well, that's five seconds
times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster. (PBS, Revenge of the Nerds, Part 3)
Throwing hardware at a problem means the writer failed to use his sysadmin staff to do basic capacity planning while there wasn't a problem.
And as johnlcallaway, said, the problem isn't usually CPU: most bottlenecks are either disk I/O or code-path length.
I'm a professional capacity planner, and it seems only the smartest 1% of companies ever think to bring me in to prevent problems. A slightly larger percentage do simple resource planning using the staff they already have. A good example of the latter is Flickr, described by John Allspaw in The Art of Capacity Planning, where he found I/O was his problem and I/O wait time was his critical measurement.
Failing to plan means you'll hit the knee in the response-time curve, and instead of of a few fractions of a second, response time will increase (degrade) so fast that some of your customers will think you've crashed entirely.
And that in turn becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy that you've gone out of business (;-()
Alas, the people who fail to plan seem to be the great majority, and suffer cruely from their failure. The last few percent are those unfortunates whose professional staff planned, warned, and were ignored. Their managers pop up, buy some CPUs or memory to solve their I/O problem, scream at their vendor for not solving the problem and then suddenly go quiet. The hardware usually show up on eBay, so I think you can guess what happened.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
When I was programmer, we once had a programming job at a large bank. One of our main reports was running across all booked loans and calculated the futural finance stream (interest and amortization) either until the debt was paid off, or up to 40 years at current interest rates. This report was sent to the Federal Bank for control, and to the department tasked with managing the bonds to get enough capital for further loans.
This report took 200 processor hours to complete. To get it done, it was split into 18 tranches, each running 11 hours. So it was possible to complete the job during a weekend run on 18 processors, and restart it twice in case of errors.
A colleague of mine took the task to rewrite the report to speed it up. For that she hooked into each booking that changed the amount of loan or the interest rate, repayment, end-of-contract or amortization and modified it so it wrote a flag into a table.
Then she rewrote the central report to store the calculated finance stream each time it was calculated. Loans that were unchanged since the last calculation didn't have a flag set, so the report took the old calculation. This sped up the report about 150 times: Instead of 200 processor hours now it completed within 1:20 h.
It allowed to put four large RS/6000 out of service, cancelling of the service contracts, rescheduling the report to run daily instead on weekends and saving on weekend man hours. With the daily report to the bond managment department also the finance controlling unit became interested and used the report results to refine their own tools. This together easily paid the amount of programming time put into the report.
As you can see: There are programming task where just throwing more computing power at doesn't solve the problem. It hasn't even to be some high level programming job, sometimes it's a dull task (finding all points in a bookkeeping system where the booking changes the finance stream of a loan is a dull task!), but if someone gets it done, it pays off easily.
The idea expressed in that article isn't just stupid, it is economy destroying, civilization threatening, mind-bogglingly stupid.
The author is trying to solve the problem of inadequate resources buy spending more to increase the brute force effort toward his already failing solution. It is the mythical man month expressed in CPU horsepower.
That isn't improving your situation, that is merely delaying your inevitable downfall. You're running to stand still, and eventually your organization will collapse of exhaustion, while your competitors, who invested in smart design and smart people, lap your corpse.
And if you simply can't afford better people, then your reach is exceeding your grasp. Scale back your ambition, plan for when you can, or accept your niche and buy the third party solutions produced by experts who can write scalable software.
Who will be the first to post "ICodeInJavaWithClassesWithReallyReallyReallyLongNames.youIgnorantClod();" ?
extremism is bad at EVERYthing.
See? You used the shift key. That wasn't so hard, now, was it?
I will send you $20 bucks if you post a photo of yourself holding a sign that says "A non-white immigrant paid me $20 to hold this sign."
Are you high? Granted, I haven't been to Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands) since 2006, but I can't name a single thing that was less expensive, and I live in one of the most expensive cities in the US ($9 Beer Night).
I specifically went looking for cheap Lacoste stuff in France, and there was essentially dollar to euro parity, while the exchange rate was about 1.5:1. In other words, while I would pay $70 (just got a couple for $30 each on sale) for a shirt in the US, in France the same shirt was going for 70 euros. Food and drink prices seemed to be roughly comparable as well. Consumer Electronics, however, were considerably more expensive than in the US, as was gas. The metro was no less expensive than the DC subway, and the trains weren't cheaper than Amtrak, though 1000% better. I'd have to assume the reason that you believe it's actually cheaper is because you enjoy being banged out for taxes all the time.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
If they're watching movies all day long, just fire them. No need to re-orient their monitors.
Worst BBC News Stories
But the observation on cost also means that good programmers should focus on correctness rather than performance.
Just to illustrate how difficult it is to get correctness right, on page 56 of The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike---very highly regarded book and highly regarded authors---there is a hash table lookup function that is combined with insert to perform optional insertion when the key is not found in the table. It assumes that the value argument can be safely discarded if insertion is not performed. That assumption works fine with integers, but not with pointers to memory objects, file descriptors, or any handle to a resource. An inexperienced programmer trying to generalize int value to void *value will induce memory leak on behalf of the user of the function.
Or, for a modest increase in hardware requirements to get the same performance, we can introduce automatic resource management (aka garbage collection) which makes this particular little difficulty go away.
Pivoting means that ClearType or favorite subpixel rendering of your choice won't work. And I do really prefer ClearType, in the same way I prefer dualmon and high resolution.
This comes down to choosing the right tool for the job. Perhaps their application is written using frameworks which enable/enforce this kind of normal transactional processing of requests.
Now if the existing application is the only way that they know how to get to the data, then it may easily become the golden-hammer / silver bullet that gets used for performing an upgrade, rather than writing an external sql script which they might not be familiar with. Add to this the common convention of "nothing touches my database except my application", which has proven to be useful by preventing rogue updates which cause application 'bugs', and the golden-hammer / silver bullet becomes even more appealing.
SQL script wouldn't be the only non-application choice, there are quite a few good ETL solutions available, however these tend to cost quite a bit and perhaps the vendor does not want to impose another licence fee onto the client. This brings up a point more relevent to the main article thread, when deciding whether to throw people or hardware ata particular problem, you always have to be aware of the hidden costs i.e. licences for all software used including pre-requisites, network capacity, server-room capacity power & cooling etc. Naturally wide-spread use of open source software makes the initial calculation of software licencing cost a lot easier, although I'm sure that there are those who could argue that the savings on open-source software licences are eroded by necessary additional staff costs.
RTFM is not a radio station.
I am late here for this story, but I would like to add something to it for the sake of the late readers anyway :)
In the second half of 2001 I was on a project for a long time defunct company called WorldInsure (hey, former Corelan guys, any of you still out there, working for Symcor by any chance?)
So, I came in about half way into the one year project, in a few months the person who was the most senior developer on the project left but the team was still about 40 people in total. The application was something like 5MegaBucks by the end, but the client didn't want to pay the last million, because the performance was outrageously slow. 12 concurrent transactions per second as opposed to the 200 that the client wanted on 2 gigantic for the time 4 way Sun servers.
The app was a very detailed page after page insurance questionnaire, that would branch into more and more pages and questions as previous questions were answered. At some point a PDF was generated with the answers and provided on one of the last pages. The problem was with moving from page to page, the waiting times were too long, approaching minute wait times for some pages.
I was asked to speed it up. Long story short, after 1.5 months of tinkering with code produced by a bunch of novices, here is the list of improvements that I can remember at this point:
1. Removed about 80% of unnecessary database reading by removing TopLink.
2. Removed about 80% of unnecessary database writing by changing the way the data was persisted. Instead of persisting the entire data set on each new page, only the incremental changes now were persisted.
3. Reduced the page pre-processing by getting rid of the XSLT transformers on XML structures and switching to JSPs instead.
4. Removed cluster IO thrashing by reducing the session object size from unnecessary 1MB to a manageable 10Kb.
5. Reduced CPU load by caching certain data sets instead of reprocessing them on each request within a user session.
6. Decoupled PDF generation into a separate application and communicated the request to generate the PDF via a simple home grown message queue done with a database table. This was one of the more serious problems within the app. because it could bring down a server due to the buggy code in the Adobe PDF generator that was used at the time. In fact the original application ran the PDF generation as a separate Java application that would be restarted after about 5 generations and would be called via System.execute call so not to bring down the BEA Weblogic. Later on this entire portion was rewritten and the Adobe code thrown away. I am sure that today the Adobe code is fine and all, but at the time it was a real pig.
7. Removed many many many many unnecessary System.out.println calls, and replaced with proper logging where needed.
8. Fixed the home grown servlet manager (similar to Struts main servlet), this code was freaking ugly as hell and totally unstable.
There were some other smaller fixes, but the main bulk is listed here. By the end of the month and a half the app was doing over 300 simultaneous transactions per second.
300/12, that's 25 times code performance improvement. I am not at all convinced that this improvement could have been achived through hardware at all, but even if it could, it would have cost much more than what I cost at the time (was like 70CAD/hr for 1.5 months.)
Oh, did I mention that the client coughed out the last million bucks after that? After all, the code met their performance expectations and exceeded them by half at least.
You can't handle the truth.
Common issue indeed, and actually a problem with Hibernate... in this day and age, there are algorythms that can be implemented in Object relational mappers to avoid what is at least the common scenario for this to happen in Hibernate or LINQ to SQL/Entity Framework...I'm not sure why it never gets fixed.
That being said, if you read the article (I know, i know, slashdot), they're talking about premature optimisation. Basically, things like avoiding Hibernate completly because of its overhead, or optimising every single queries as much as possible (even if performance is acceptable) to save every last bit of juice, so that your app can run on 10 megs of RAM instead of 100. They're not, in any way, talking about using shitty programmers, but advocate using GOOD developer's time more efficiently (solving real problems, instead of spending too much time on performance).
Almost everyone who replied saying it was stupid, almost ALL brought up either how programming mistakes can screw things up, or how its possible to make a system that doesn't scale at all. All those people missed the point.
You can make a system that is slower, but still scales and is still correctly done a LOT (and I mean a LOT) faster, if you don't go nitpicky and try and optimise everything as you go. You simply avoid doing something totally dumb, code according to best practice, etc, but you're not going to rewrite your system in C to avoid Garbage Collection, you're not going to rewrite the data structures of the framework to squeeze a 1% performance, and you won't avoid Hibernate (completly) to avoid the mapping overhead. You can tap into these time saving paradigms just by upgrading your hardware. You still need competent developers!!! But those competent developers can do more in less time.
Thats -all- what the author was advocating.
A handy note for those that don't know, Under X11 in addition to the rgb and bgr subpixel orderings, you can chose vrgb and vgbr vertical orientations to allow subpixel rendering (ClearType) for odd or rotated lcd screens.
http://notanumber.net/