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Comment by adsharma

12 hours ago

You probably weren't there when servers were running for many days at a time.

By the time you joined and benchmarked these systems, the continuous rolling deployment had taken over. If you're restarting the server every few hours, of course the memory fragmentation isn't much of an issue.

> But you were unable to show an advantage at the system level when challenged on it, and that's what matters.

You mean 5 years after I stopped working on the kernel and the underlying system had changed?

I don't recall ever talking to you on the matter.

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adsharma

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jcalvinowens  12 hours ago

> By the time you joined and benchmarked these systems, the continuous rolling deployment had taken over

Nope, I started in 2014.

> I don't recall ever talking to you on the matter.

I recall. You refused to believe the benchmark results and made me repeat the test, then stopped replying after I did :)

  • adsharma  11 hours ago

    The patches were written in 2011 and published in 2012. They did what they were supposed to at the time.

    For the peanut gallery: this is a manifestation of an internal eng culture at fb that I wasn't particularly fond of. Celebrating that "I killed X" and partying about it.

    You didn't reply to the main point: did you benchmark a server that was running several days at a time? Reasonable people can disagree about whether this a good deployment strategy or not. I tend to believe that there are many places which want to deploy servers and run for months if not days.

    • alexgartrell  11 hours ago

      For the peanut gallery more: I worked with both of these guys at Meta on this.

      The "servers are only on for a few hours" thing was like never true so I have no idea where that claim is coming from. The web performance test took more than a few hours to run alone and we had way more aggressive soaks for other workloads.

      My recollection was that "write zeroes" just became a cheaper operation between '12 and '14.

      A fun fact to distract from the awkwardness: a lot of the kernel work done in the early days was exceedingly scrappy. The port mapping stuff for memcached UDP before SO_REUSEPORT for example. FB binaries couldn't even run on vanilla linux a lot of the time. Over the next several years we put a TON of effort in getting as close to mainline as possible and now Meta is one of the biggest drivers of Linux development.

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