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