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From the article: “Huge machine - 8 CPUs, 16 GB of memory”

That’s barely more than a raspberry pi? (4 vs 8 cores) Huge machines today have 20+ TBs of RAM and hundreds of cores. Even top-end consumer machines can have 512GB of RAM!

I do agree with the author that single machines can scale far beyond what most orgs / companies need, but I think they may be underestimating how far that goes by orders-of-magnitude



A large number of issues on an open source server are people wondering why perf is so bad when they give it a single core. Single core performance hasn’t improved much in the last 10-15 years, but more and more of them can be accessed. It blows me away how expensive they are that people need to worry about it.


Intel's single core performance has 3.4xed in 15 years (980X vs 285K)

Single core perf doubled every 8 years, multicore every 6 years, and GPUs every 3 years !


What evidence are you using for that single core claim?

In 8 years, Ryzen went from 1166 geekbench 6 single core to 3398.



Single core performance isn't just clock frequency. It must be multiplied by average IPC, but really it's more difficult since you have to account for factors like new SIMD instructions. Effective IPC improvements are where a significant fraction of single core speedup came from in this period


AWS calls it 2xlarge


True :) I did it on purpose to show that even with these modest resources you can achieve amazing performance - better than most systems would ever need


You can spend less than double, what Digitalocean charges for 8 cores, at Hetzner and get ten times more cores on a single machine




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