[9fans] Article: Modern storage is plenty fast. It is the APIs that are bad.

[9fans] Article: Modern storage is plenty fast. It is the APIs that are bad.

[Robert Sherwood]

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This is a very interesting article. I'm not enough of an expert on low
level device access APIs to judge its accuracy, but I thought some of you
might find it interesting.

https://itnext.io/modern-storage-is-plenty-fast-it-is-the-apis-that-are-bad-6a68319fbc1a

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Re: [9fans] Article: Modern storage is plenty fast. It is the APIs that are bad.

[Aleksandar Kuktin]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 08:38:14 -0500
Robert Sherwood <robert.sherwood@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is a very interesting article. I'm not enough of an expert on low
> level device access APIs to judge its accuracy, but I thought some of
> you might find it interesting.
> 
> https://itnext.io/modern-storage-is-plenty-fast-it-is-the-apis-that-are-bad-6a68319fbc1a

I had to view this article in Lynx because Firefox wouldn't display
it, due to all the JavaScript. I think that is a good, apt and
important metaphor for the state of modern IT. xD

On the assumption one actually is in a situation where usage of NVMe
devices make sense apriori, I think the article makes valid points. The
catch is most of us are in situations where rotary disks are just good
enough, so the very use of bus-connected SSD storage is under question.

Illustrations: in terms of personal use of computers, I find that only
the very latest of so-called "AAA video games" are having problems with
my single spindle. YouTube doesn't really depend on the (my) disk. For
some years now, I've been working in a web-business, and speaking in
those terms, if you own the hardware your business runs on, you will
probably be playing an optimization game where cost is sure to be a
pretty serious long term concern (even though I hear that on the West
they shell out enormous money for hardware since optimization experts
cost even more that warehouses of underutilized hardware). I did a
little check on Amazon and can see that per-TiB, rotary disks are still
about half the price of various bus-connected SSDs. That's a headwind.
Does it really make sense to spend thousands of iops on a requirement
that could be removed spending a day or two optimizing the server
application? I'm also not sure what effects RAID will have on the
performance of these disks. And if you happen to be a pleb that
utilizes the cloud, you can kiss your I/O optimizations goodbye since
your disk actually lives on a different floor, maybe even a different
building than your CPU/memory and they are connected through a thin
iSCSI/FibreChannel straw you happen to share with 30 other people.

However, io_uris is a very likable solution. I'm glad I read a bit
about it, even if it isn't really all that revolutionary. Good
solutions rarely are. ;)

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