threading

[Roy Smith]

In article <QLQ0v.62026$oI.9712 at fx18.am4>,
 alister <alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> > My personal feeling is that asynchronous i/o is mostly useful on 32-bit
> > systems, and the problem it actually solves is the limited virtual
> > address space. On a 64 bit system we can just throw more RAM at it and
> > threads be fine.
> > 
> As my only professional coding experience has been with embedded 8 bit 
> processors with limited resources i naturally abhorrent to the process of 
> "Just throw more RAM (Or any other resource for that matter)at it".
> 
> It is my personal opinion that the quality of code has diminished 
> steadily as physical limitations on the programmer have been reduced, of 
> course I could be wrong so I would like to here other peoples views on 
> this.

I can rent a machine with 30 GB (r3.xlarge) of RAM from Amazon for about 
$3000/year (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/).  A 60 GB machine 
(r3.2xlarge) is exactly twice that.  You get more CPU and SSD too, but 
for the moment, I'm thinking about this as just renting memory.

Glassdoor.com says the median salary for a "software architect" New York 
is $115k.  By the time I'm done with personnel-related overhead, that 
person is really going to cost me $150k.

Let's say I've got a program which consumes 60 GB of RAM, so I'm renting 
the 2xlarge instance to run it.  My software architect could recode the 
program to be more efficient, and fit into just 30 GB, saving me 
$3000/year.  How much of his time is it worth to do that?  He's costing 
me about $600/day, so if he can do it in a week, it'll take a year to 
recoup my investment.

Oh, by the way, those prices I quoted are the on-demand prices.  If I'm 
willing to sign a three year contract, I can cut the annual cost almost 
in half.  And the cost of hardware keeps going down, while the cost of 
good programmers keeps going up.