undefined | Better HN

0 pointsSeanSullivan863mo ago0 comments

I'm aware of this to an extent. Do you know of any list of what degree of parallelization to expect out of various components? I know this whole napkin-math thing is mostly futile and the answer should mostly be "go test it", but just curious.

I was interviewing recently and was asked about implementing a web crawler and then were discussing bottlenecks (network fetching the pages, writing the content to disk, CPU usage for stuff like parsing the responses) and parallelism, and I wanted to just say "well, i'd test it to figure out what I was bottlenecked on and then iterate on my solution".

0 comments

moab3mo ago

Napkin math is how you avoid spending several weeks of your life going down ultimately futile rabbit holes. Yes, it's approximations, often very coarse ones, but done right they do work.

Your question about what degree of parallelization is unfortunately too vague to really answer. SSDs offer some internal parallelism. Need more parallelism / IOPS? You can stick a lot more SSDs on your machine. Need many machines worth of SSDs? Disaggregate them, but now you need to think about your network bandwidth, NICs, cross-machine latency, and fault-tolerance.

The best engineers I've seen are usually excellent at napkin math.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsSeanSullivan863mo ago0 comments

0 comments

moab3mo ago

Napkin math is how you avoid spending several weeks of your life going down ultimately futile rabbit holes. Yes, it's approximations, often very coarse ones, but done right they do work.

The best engineers I've seen are usually excellent at napkin math.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse