from Hacker News

Some Reasons to Measure

by cdwhite on 8/27/21, 11:00 AM with 17 comments

  • by vajrabum on 8/28/21, 3:45 AM

    Looks like he wasn't kidding, at least for Java shops with untuned JVMs. This was linked from the article and from Dan Luu's work at Twitter. "We spent one day1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since I like boring, descriptive, names.

    https://danluu.com/metrics-analytics/

    I'll add that I worked in systems at a large php shop which didn't have good metrics for utilization. After the adoption of HHVM their utilization dropped enough that they ended up buying extra hardware in the 6 figures. They knew that performance was a lot better but they didn't quantify it. So surprise! All it took to figure that out and start making better decisions was to collect SAR data and dump it to a central log. So, yeah. Boring is good or at least a good place to start.

  • by amadeuspagel on 8/27/21, 2:59 PM

    Measuring is undervalued, particularly vs writing, because it doesn't show off creativity.

  • by _tom_ on 8/28/21, 7:55 AM

    damn, that’s a lot of interesting content. I meant to go to sleep an hour ago, and I’m still reading.

  • by shele on 8/28/21, 7:41 AM

    Talking about measuring time I would put a date on the blog post

  • by k__ on 8/28/21, 11:13 AM

    "When the reporter doesn't have a repro for the bug, which is quite common when it comes to distributed systems, the bug will be written off as non-existent"

    This.

    If this is your modus operandi, then please think twice.

    For me, as the person with the problem, this just sounds like "I don't want to be bothered with this right now".

    Most maintainers don't see this as a possibility to improve their project, but as trouble for their brilliant idea. Grow up!