undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdietr1ch7mo ago0 comments

More than disk space I think they care about having short links, higher cache hit rates and saving RAM on their fleet.

0 comments

smaudet7mo ago

I find even this incredibly stingy... Back of the envelope:

1043*1000000000 / (1023^3)

10 4 byte characters times 3 billion links, dividing by 1 GB of memory...

Roughly 111 GB of RAM.

Which is like nothing to a search giant.

To put that into perspective, my Desktop Computer's max Mobo memory is 128 GB, so saying it has to do with RAM is like saying they needed to shut off a couple servers...and save like maybe a thousand dollars.

This reeks of something else, if not just sheer ineptitude...

dietr1chOP7mo ago

> Roughly 111 GB of RAM. Which is like nothing to a search giant.

You are forgetting job replication. A global service can easily have 100s of jobs on 10-20 datacenters. Saving 111TiB of RAM can probably pay your salary forever. I think I paid mine with fewer savings while there. During covid there was a RAM shortage too enough to have a call to prefer trading CPU to save RAM with changes to the rule of thumb resource costs.

nomel7mo ago

> A global service can easily have 100s of jobs on 10-20 datacenters.

There's obviously, something in between maintaining the latency with 20 datacenter, increasing the latency a bit reducing hosting to a couple $100 worth of servers, and setting the latency to infinity, which was the original plan.

1 more reply

Retr0id7mo ago

If they really are only purging the inactive ones, this shouldn't impact cache hit rate much.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse