[HN Gopher] Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a frac...
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       Transparent memory offloading: more memory at a fraction of the
       cost and power
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2022-06-20 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (engineering.fb.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (engineering.fb.com)
        
       | throwaway81523 wrote:
       | Nice, they have reinvented virtual memory and paging to disk.
        
       | woleium wrote:
       | or "Meta re-invents swap disk"
        
         | jhgg wrote:
         | You should read the whole article, because TMO does differ from
         | traditional swapping. Notably, swapping usually occurs during
         | periods of extreme memory pressure, where as TMO will offload
         | memory much sooner and more intelligently.
        
       | trhway wrote:
       | >Using a compressed-memory back end, TMO saves 7 percent to12
       | percent of resident memory across five applications. Multiple
       | applications' data have poor compressibility, such that
       | offloading to an SSD proves far more effective.
       | 
       | that in general sounds strange. My experience across different
       | application types over more than 2 decades has been very
       | different (not about SSD, i mean the compression in memory have
       | been always a very efficient approach).
       | 
       | > Specifically, machine learning models used for Ads prediction
       | commonly use quantized byte-encoded values that exhibit a
       | compression ratio of 1.3-1.4x.
       | 
       | yep, i haven't used compression for that. That though calls for a
       | question - how many of those models do FB have in memory. Any
       | chance FB instantiates such a model for every user/request? :)
        
       | MarkSweep wrote:
       | Computer storage hierarchies are sure getting complex with CXL
       | and NVM in the mix.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-20 23:00 UTC)