October 18, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Vast Expansions of Hardware
October 18, 2024 at 6:58 am
It's an interesting article.
You mention the growth of the amount of memory, memory bandwidth has grown at the same pace. Memory bandwidth is crucial, especially for databases.
Also, as capacity has grown, we seem to use it up faster than the actual growth. Applications are getting less and less efficient as more resources are available.
October 18, 2024 at 9:29 pm
One of my early job interviews, I was asked how I would spec a server for best performance. My answer was immediate: max it out at 4GB of RAM. I guess it was the right answer because I not only got the job, but spent my day babysitting that 4GB server that they purchased. No, I won't say how long ago that was.
Regarding your observation about server RAM, in my experience allocating multiple TBs of RAM is simply not as critical as it used to be (due to fast disk) and in fact may be actually detrimental, causing excessive startup/shutdown durations both for the SQL Server service as well as for the entire machine.
Also - and this is a horrible reason but - with multiple VMs on a host it's easier to oversubscribe vCPUs than vRAM. Limiting a VM's memory allocation allows tighter packing of hosts. In the real world that could certainly be a deciding factor, especially if licensing is at the host level.
October 22, 2024 at 10:41 pm
It's an interesting article.
You mention the growth of the amount of memory, memory bandwidth has grown at the same pace. Memory bandwidth is crucial, especially for databases.
Also, as capacity has grown, we seem to use it up faster than the actual growth. Applications are getting less and less efficient as more resources are available.
For sure. The glut of hardware lets people be really inefficient and not care.
Until there's contention.
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