Comment by rb2k_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rb2k_ | Hacker News Reader

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Since the post mentions performance as one of the main problems, it seems kinda strange to defend the Mac Pro.

The trashcan Mac Pro has very outdated Xeon E5620 CPUs and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of upgrades in the pipeline. I can even see Apple stopping the sale of these in favor of iMacs.

I think any 'regular' sever with e.g. an Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 be about twice as fast for basically the same price.

I'd assume that image manipulation is mainly a CPU bound issue.

> Racking servers, even if they're cylindrical, is actually much easier than building an entire real-time image rendering pipeline from scratch.

Scaling a service based on Mac Pros is probably much harder than starting to port pieces of a real-time image rendering pipeline to hardware that is a lot faster and more readily available. To be honest, for the price of the Mac Pros, you can probably run a lot of CPU hours in AWS / ... and skip the whole rack-n-stack.

That being said, I'm not the one running an image rendering business, so I'm just armchair quarterbacking :)

I appreciate the feedback. These architecture choices are something that I think about a lot, but for now I'm satisfied that we chose the right path based on our requirements at the time.

It is annoying that Apple has let the current Mac Pro rot on the vine to a large extent. This is something that certainly gives me pause and will be factored in to the future direction of our rendering pipeline. There may not be much of a future for image rendering on Macs at imgix, but we have to factor in all the variables when deciding on our future roadmap.

The difference between a v2 and v3 CPU definitely isn't double performance, by the way. An E5-2697v2 (the top-of-line Mac Pro CPU) is a 970 on SPECintrate, and an E5-2697v3 is a 1240 on SPECintrate (we track other measurements, but that's the quickest comparison I found). So it's better for sure, but it's also 15W higher draw and has 2 more cores to help grow those numbers. Per-core performance on SPECint is only 60 vs 64.

That said, in a perfect world I would love to use v3 or v4 Xeons on our image rendering hosts. It just wouldn't be a night-and-day kind of difference that's worth throwing our existing pipeline out over. Have to be careful not to toss the baby with the bathwater here.

The real performance issue for us this time around was adding machines to overcome certain scalability constraints, and optimizing certain code paths that were prohibitively expensive.

> There may not be much of a future for image rendering on Macs at imgix, but we have to factor in all the variables when deciding on our future roadmap.

I think the point here is that your roadmap may lead off-road once Apple finally does to the desktops what they did to the headphone jack on the iPhone(ignore the outcry, do whatever they bloody-well please).

Yep, Apple does whatever Apple wants to do. That's a business risk, and we have done (and will continue to do) things to mitigate it.

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