Busting Modern Hardware Myths (2013)

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/6/13/busting-4-modern-hardware-myths-are-memory-hdds-and-ssds-rea.html?

by nkurz • 12 years ago

110 37 12 years ago

adwn3• 12 years ago

I have never heard of the myth that "HDDs provide random access". As far back as I can remember, HDDs were always the archetypal example for non-random access storage media.

Florin_Andrei• 12 years ago

As far back as I can remember, HDDs were always the archetypal example for non-random access storage media.

I'm pretty sure that's tape, not HDD.

1amzave2• 12 years ago

I'd say "random access" is basically just a relative term. Tape, yes, is about the least random-access-friendly medium I can think of. Compared to that, HDDs are quite efficient at random access. DRAM then makes HDDs look like tape in comparison, but even that in turn has its own slight differences in behaviour between sequential and random access (row buffers, prefetching...).

adwn3• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's tape, not HDD.

Nope, I'm only 27.

trhway• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's tape, not HDD.

HDD is the new tape.

personZ• 12 years ago

Indeed. IOPS has been the achilles head of magnetic disks for time eternal.

But ultimately calling these "myths" is somewhat absurd. Everything is relative. Relative to a magnetic hard drive, main memory offers impossibly fast random access. Sure, it's slow compared to cache memory, but that is a different discussion, and a different level of optimization. Similarly, when your SSD offers you 10s to 100s of thousands of random seeks per second, it is a universe better than the 10s to low 100 of a magnetic disk.

incision• 12 years ago

'I have never heard of the myth that "HDDs provide random access".'

I haven't heard it stated directly, but I've seen it implied plenty. The typical scenario is simply someone who doesn't grok the gulf between random and sequential disk performance.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

That's funny, but I realize you probably didn't mean it to be.

the old "SAM" (Sequential Access Method) libraries talked to tape, and "DASD" (Direct Access Storage Devices) were what you and I would call a hard drive.

Think 'relative seek time' on a tape seeking to the correct block can take minutes, on disks it generally takes milliseconds. Both of them are accessed sequentially once you seek to the correct block, and that was the point of the article. Relative to seek time, disk reads are taking longer (a consequence of one physical head serving more potential bits).

I tried to get Seagate to put two independent R/W heads in a disk once. They wouldn't go for it.

Back to your comment though "RAM" as in Random Access Memory is often distinguished from Hard Drives, especially in early computer science classes to point out the differences. And again what this article is saying is that even dynamic RAM today, looks more like an I/O device than memory.

In the early 2000's at NetApp, one of the performance engineers managed to track down the performance limiter on Pentium 4's to the frontside bus memory controller. The FSB could only issue so many memory transactions per second, and the P4 had doubled the length of a cache line (that improved streaming performance at the expense of everything else). The tricky bit was that the chip reported CPU 100% busy, but in reality it was the memory controller that was busy, not the CPU.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

Random Access simply means that you can hit any part of the device 'at will' without skip all the data in between where you are and where you want to be.

Sequential access indicates that you have to pass all the data between where you are and where you want to go underneath the read head. So a denser medium would increase your access time unless you also changed some other fundamental (such as the speed with which you can move your medium around).

For a disk drive rotational speeds and head seek times have been more or less constant for a very long time, so the time to access a certain block can be computed without the underlying storage density becoming a factor.

So historically RA indicates disks/drums and so on and SA indicates tapes and derivatives. Bubble memory and its more recent incarnations are somewhere in the middle.

yvdriess• 12 years ago

Are any of these a surprise to anyone here?

I am not asking this rhetorically.

ohashi• 12 years ago

It was definitely interesting to learn a few little things like 1 divide being slower than +-

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p1esk• 12 years ago

For me, the surprise was to learn that access time for L1 cache is 3 cycles. I thought it should be 1 cycle.

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Tuna-Fish• 12 years ago

Actually 4 cycles for modern cpus. The access time of a cache depends mostly on it's size (wire delay and switching time for the access tree). This means that cache sizes are always tradeoffs between hit rate and access time. As cpus get better at hiding latency, the access latency is loosened.

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wtracy• 12 years ago

The idea that mutating files in place is actually very expensive is new to me.

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t1m• 12 years ago

I found the SSD discussion very useful. Bottom line is that deleting (or rewriting) data causes unpredictable and degraged write performance due to "write amplification". Sticking to appends-only writes keeps things fast.

I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from watching the video. At least read the slides!

http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-aar-2012/slides/MartinThompson_My...

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gizmo686• 12 years ago

Network cards write directly into cache

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hhw• 12 years ago

This feature, known as DDIO, is only on Intel's Xeon E5 and E7 v2 family CPUs. So, it's not quite ubiquitous yet, nor have there been any announcements on when it will become available (if ever) on the lower Xeon E3 or any of the desktop lines, despite a good amount of information already having been revealed on the next 2-3 generations of processors.

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mtdewcmu2• 12 years ago

I was a little surprised that it was called a myth that CPUs are not getting faster. CPUs may still be getting a little faster, but they are way off the exponential curve that they were on at one time. They look like they're asymptotically approaching some constant now. It certainly wouldn't hurt your code at all if you make the assumption that CPUs are no longer getting faster. Your code would probably be better.

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InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

CPUs are still getting a lot faster, at a geometric rate. But they are doing so at a different rate than they did in the '90s, where CPUS were getting enormously faster year over year.

Here's a chart (note that the vertical scale is logarithmic): http://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png

In the '90s processors were doubling in performance every 20 months or so (i.e. a factor of 64x per decade). Since about 2005 processors have been doubling in performance about every 43 months. This is much slower than the insanely fast rate during the '90s but it is still very fast and still on an exponential curve.

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Fr0styMatt• 12 years ago

An important overall point that the article seems to be highlighting is that, in general (independent of these myths), developers are becoming less and less familiar with what the underlying system is doing. Or perhaps the more correct term is that developers are becoming more 'distant' -- there are more layers of abstraction in the whole system than there have been in the past. At the top, programming languages themselves want to get more abstract to make the process of writing software more efficient and in some ways more automated. At the bottom, hardware needs to use clever design to hide performance limitations that we come up against.

The problem is that sometimes, these abstractions leak. Knowing that what you're seeing is one of those leaks is key to not go down the rabbit hole of, for example, chasing a bug that ends up being caused by a hardware failure (painful experience!). So you have to keep notice of those layers below those you're directly working with; while you don't have to live there, you shouldn't totally ignore their existence.

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codehero• 12 years ago

In Myth 4 SSDs, Thompson claims that:

"there's a limited number of times you can READ and ERASE a block" (emphasis mine)

My understanding is that ERASE cycles are what's limited; reading and writing are not destructive to the flash.

Busting Modern Hardware Myths (2013)

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