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Facebook VP Slams Intel's, AMD's Chip Performance Claims

Posted by timothy on from the more-than-half-of-you-less-than-half-as-well-as-you-deserve dept.

narramissic writes "In an interview on stage at GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of technical operations, told Om Malik that the latest generations of server processors from Intel and AMD don't deliver the performance gains that 'they're touting in the press.' 'And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is,' Heiliger said. He also had some harsh words for server makers: 'You guys don't get it,' Heiliger said. 'To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.' Heiliger added that Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."

8 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You're Computin' for a Shootin' Mister by Daengbo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can we get like a panel of hardware engineers to have a discussion with this guy and can I get some popcorn?

    Slashdotters might want to take a look at the details of the Google servers to see what Heiliger is looking for. There's also a video tour.

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  2. Re:Well I suppose... by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's see... IBM, Sun, Fujitsu, Itanium (yeah, its still Intel, but has great performance)... All of these can offer equivalent or much better performance at these kinds of applications than what they're using. Don't bitch if you're not willing to consider the alternatives.

  3. Re:You're Computin' for a Shootin' Mister by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    At low DC voltages, you can't really do long cable runs without either suffering substantial resistive losses or using cable so thick you could club a seal to death with it.

  4. Re:Facebook's application is poorly coded by hidden · · Score: 5, Informative

    Facebook is written in PHP; there are no compile flags.

    apache and the php engine have plenty of compile flags. not to mention whatever the database is.

  5. Re:Hm... by HockeyPuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    The average server is going to be much more I/O intensive than CPU intensive unless you do cluster computing or render a lot of stuff.

    As someone who designs and deploys large storage environments for a living, I call BS. While the current generation of HBAs are 8Gb FibreChannel, I would say that the "average server" (as you put it) could happily live on a 1Gb HBA. Recall that almost all servers, or atleast those you care about, have DUAL HBA connections to their respective storage. So that's actually 2Gb of storage connectivity. Sure there are servers which have multiple HBAs, or use a higher utilization of the HBAs, such as database servers or backup/media servers. Most servers today are deployed with dual 4Gb HBAs as the 8Gb SFPs/optics are still quite pricey, and you cannot, in all seriousness, purchase 1 or 2Gb FC HBAs.

    Even as we deploy VMware based servers, the VMware servers themselves tend to be more memory/cpu strapped than IO.

    It would be very rare, or almost impossible for a server to be driving linerate HBAs, with still plenty of headroom left in the CPU. Even basic test tools like IOmeter require significant CPU usage to drive an HBA to capacity. And that is when it's writing/reading all zeros. It's doesn't actually need to do anything with the data. As would be the case if a database server was requesting 2Gb/s from a disk array, and then had to join/sort/add/whatever the tables retrieved.

     

  6. Strange... by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since when do we listen to manufacturer's claims? You take the new hardware, stress test it with your custom software, record results, plan servers accordingly. How hard is it really to commission a server design that meets your needs and then QA some prototypes?

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  7. Re:You're Computin' for a Shootin' Mister by rcw-home · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think they run AC to the row or rack of servers, then they have just one super efficient PSU powering all the servers in a rack rather than 42 separate power supplies (plus UL enclosures, connectors, extension cords, etc, etc)

    No, they don't. They use motherboards built to their own specification that require only 12V power. This power is supplied by the server's own PSU, which takes 240V input. The PSU hooks into a 12V sealed lead acid battery, implementing UPS functionality (there is no centralized UPS).

    I think it's a very elegant design.

  8. Re:Facebook's application is poorly coded by cowbutt · · Score: 4, Informative
    Essentially our disks are no faster than they where 3 years ago, or even 5 years ago

    # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc

    /dev/sdc:
    Timing cached reads: 5120 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2562.04 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads: 84 MB in 3.02 seconds = 27.77 MB/sec # hdparm -i /dev/sdc | grep Model
    Model=ST3200822A, FwRev=3.01, SerialNo=xxxxxx
    # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

    /dev/sda:
    Timing cached reads: 6078 MB in 1.99 seconds = 3052.95 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads: 338 MB in 3.01 seconds = 112.22 MB/sec
    # hdparm -i /dev/sda | grep Model
    Model=ST31000333AS, FwRev=SD1B, SerialNo=xxxxxx

    It's not even a full order of magnitude faster, but 112MB/s is still nearly four times faster. And these are both magnetic discs, rather than SSDs.