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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear that we're wasting unbelievably huge amounts of computing power with the huge stacks of abstraction we're towering on.

So let's make this interesting, assuming a ground up rewrite of an entire highly optimized web application stack - from the metal on up, how many normal boxes full of server hardware could really just be handled by one? 2? a dozen?

I'd be willing to bet that a modern machine with well written, on the metal software could outperform a regular rack full of the same machines running all the nonsense we run on today.

Magnified over the entire industry, how much power and space are being wasted? What's the dollar amount on that?

What's the developer difference to accomplish this? 30% time?

What costs more? All the costs of potentially millions of wasted machines, power and cooling or millions of man hours writing better code?

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I'll take that bet.

We gain a lot with "the huge stack of abstraction". The OS gives us a ton of "goodies" for free (memory abstraction, process/thread safety, networking, etc) and the languages/libraries give us more goodies (the ability to focus on higher-level tasks rather than "bit twiddling"). One could also point to the fact that your team is taking advantage of hundreds (thousands?) of domain experts in every aspect of the stack to get the "best" solution.

I would argue that it's not "30% time". It's the accumulated time of each level of abstraction you are using combined. It is very likely the case that one team couldn't rewrite the web application stack "from the metal up" and offer significant improvements.

Still it's pretty shocking that billions of people might have to wait even a noticeable unit of time that can often be measured in seconds for a web page to go from request to final render. We're doing something wrong.

Server and desktop computing power is impressively more powerful today than when this [1] was first created, which loads almost as fast as I can take my finger off of the mouse button that clicked the link to take me there

1 - http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

yet I was able to actually count "one onethousand two onethousand three onethousand" before www.youtube.com finished rendering. I don't know, is 2.xx seconds times a billion people more efficient than a few hundred developers spending 2x or 3x longer to write efficient code?

I would say that it's a combination of both. I personally don't automatically assume the delay when clicking a link is due to the number of abstractions between my mouse and the server-side hardware that a website is running on.

In the YouTube example, you have very real speed-of-light constraints. I fired up the Chrome debugger and loaded the main site. I had over 100 requests in the first couple of seconds. Even with a very low-latency connection, assuming that your browser can "batch" the requests together, and instantaneous server response there still is an overhead of request/response of at least tens of milliseconds for each request (or group of requests).

To reduce that time, it requires reducing the number of requests, assuming that javascript/images are already loaded, parallelizing or delaying the loading of "ancillary data" etc. All of which have nothing to do with the speed of the server or the client.

Could we do this by devoting 30% of industry-wide developer time to creating faster infrastructure? Yes, perhaps we could.

Would it only cost an individual developer 30% of his/her time to write on-the-metal software rather than use all the abstractions? No way. 80%, maybe. Those abstractions save us an amazing amount of work. That's why we use them.

Running Varnish is fun for these reasons. And of course reading Poul-Henning Kamp's clearly-stated opinions. :-)

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