[flatline3]

I can't say I understand that. If RAM utilization is so vastly out-scaled as compared to CPU utilization, there's a significant resource use inefficiency at play.

Machines consume a baseline amount of power whether they're used or not; that power usage obviously increases with utilization, but ideally you'd have full utilization across the board.

If memory usage is so much higher than CPU usage, I have to wonder what it is that Mozilla is doing wrong with their architecture. Are they using pre-fork-style servers? Are they just provisioning poorly? What is it?

> CPU use is irrelevant to most internet servers.

Why? The CPU is used when the machine does anything. Ideally you're operating the machines at full capacity, less overhead to handle load spikes.

> Over the week, I operate my car engine at about 1.2% capacity. Maybe they should write about that.

What you're doing is inefficient, and they do write about that. The solution is called car sharing and public transportation.

[cube13]

>If memory usage is so much higher than CPU usage, I have to wonder what it is that Mozilla is doing wrong with their architecture. Are they using pre-fork-style servers? Are they just provisioning poorly? What is it?

Or are they just serving up web pages to users? That's RAM and bandwidth heavy, but very CPU light. You still need the machines to scale your load, but you're not going to be using the CPU.

Realistically, for just about any application, you're going to be RAM-bound before you're CPU-bound. The exceptions are(off the top of my head) scientific computing and video rendering, both of which are CPU heavy, and are very deterministic in their behaviors, which allows for heavy optimization of L2 and L3 cache misses.

[flatline3]

> Or are they just serving up web pages to users? That's RAM and bandwidth heavy, but very CPU light. You still need the machines to scale your load, but you're not going to be using the CPU.

That depends very much on the efficiency of software your architecture. A well-architected web app can scale up RAM and CPU utilization much more closely than something modeled on zero shared state independent processes.

Additionally, even if your scaling model of RAM before CPU is the only possible one, that doesn't make the utilization effecient, and implies that higher efficiency could still be reached by scaling up RAM per machine.

[jws]

What you're doing is inefficient, and they do write about that. The solution is called car sharing and public transportation.

I drive 10000 miles per year. That's about average, but nowhere near running an engine at full power 24x7.

I don't have two spare hours each day to cover the public transit time delta. (4-8 times longer than driving) Maybe if I laid off HN…