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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   1668 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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no? not every system wants the same CAP tradeoffs. not everything benefits from the overhead of being a distributed system. it's not free to make something distributed.

example: github.com has real costs because it's planet scale and multi-master. it takes 250ms+ to process your push because it makes geographic redundancy guarantees that cannot physically be improved on. if you did away with the multi-master setup it would take significantly less time

you have "solved" the distributed system problem here but making every push take that much longer is a big cost. in this case, it just so happens github doesn't care about making every developer wait an extra 250ms per push

to say nothing about how you've also blown up complexity that needs to be reasoned through and maintained

(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)

I certainly don't call 250ms a big cost here. That is literally so small that I would never notice it.

Mmm, I notice it. if I'm working on solo projects I switch to a git repo on a personal server instead of github just to avoid it

no?

So you've got a system where you can't pay some latency for availability (I'll level with you, 250ms is an ass-pull on your part, even planet scale databases like Spanner that are way overkill for something like this can manage much better latencies, to say nothing of a simple MySQL master/replica situation), but it's totally fine if it goes down and stays down over a weekend?

If we're talking about a system where 24% uptime (aka business hours) is totally cool, yeah I guess you don't need to think about reliability, but again ive never seen a system like this so i don't know if they exist.

If we're talking about a system where uptime actually matters, it's totally unsustainable to page someone awake to do a manual fail over every time the primary shits the bed. That also comes with a cost, and it's probably bigger than a few ms of latency to make sure your database is available. Making stuff run all the time is literally what computers are for.

(I'll level with you, 250ms is an ass-pull on your part, even planet scale databases like Spanner that are way overkill for something like this can manage much better latencies

I can tell you for an absolute fact that plans to use Spanner to back geographically redundant multi-master git repos made latency even worse. But this is a digression.

(and yes, it doesn't have to be geographically redundant, I'm simply upping the scale to demonstrate tradeoffs)

I'm saying the magic distributed database introduces tradeoffs over the single SQLite file, and they vary by project and used github.com as a mundane but easily accessible example.

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