[HN Gopher] Two workers are quadratically better than one (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ Two workers are quadratically better than one (2020) Author : Tomte Score : 50 points Date : 2022-05-02 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.hillelwayne.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.hillelwayne.com) | marcosdumay wrote: | As a rule, if you have more than 50% of utilization, latency | grows very quickly. That is true with any numbers. | williamkuszmaul wrote: | I'm not sure why they claim that the total time grows | quadratically. | | If tasks arrive arrive randomly at the same average rate as they | can be processed, then the amount of time that the nth task will | have to wait is proportional to sqrt(n) in expectation. So one | would expect a total waiting time of n^1.5, which incidentally | fits much better to their plotted curve than n^2 does. | travisgriggs wrote: | It's funny. I saw the headline, and my immediate association was | "employees" rather than computation tasks. And I was thinking | "not even!" It's been my experience that scaling up employee | count, has diminishing returns, with even some net negatives with | some adds. | | I'm not sure I buy the quadratic gains, but the general gst is | that if done correctly, two processes/tasks/workers/etc is better | than one. | | So why is this? Why does it work in computing, but not with | people? Is it the nature of the tasks (one is problem solving, | the other is grinding out computations?). Is it differences in | configuration? | rootusrootus wrote: | Discussion from 2020: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25001875 | civilized wrote: | Two workers are infinitely better than one for latency, if you | have slightly more work than one worker can do ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-02 23:00 UTC)