IssueRaiser

Yes, to expand: Both search and ads mean serving immense amounts of traffic and users while earning tiny amounts of revenue per unit of e...

Yes, to expand: Both search and ads mean serving immense amounts of traffic and users while earning tiny amounts of revenue per unit of each. The dominant mid-90s model of buying racks of Sun and NetApp gear, writing big checks to Oracle, etc, would have been too expensive for Google. Instead they made a big investment in Linux running on large quantities of commodity x86 PC hardware, and building software on top of that to get the most out of it. That means things like combining workloads with different profiles onto the same servers, and cgroups kind of falls out of that. Other companies like Yahoo, Whatsapp, Netflix also followed interesting patterns of using strong understanding of how to be efficient on cheap hardware. Notably those three all were FreeBSD users at least in their early days.

Posted by hedgehog on Oct 13, 2025, 9:30 PM

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Yes, to expand: Both search and ads mean serving immense amounts of traffic and users while earning tiny amounts of revenue per unit of e...

hedgehogOct 13, 2025, 9:30 PM

Yes, to expand: Both search and ads mean serving immense amounts of traffic and users while earning tiny amounts of revenue per unit of each. The dominant mid-90s model of buying racks of Sun and NetApp gear, writing big checks to Oracle, etc, would have been too expensive for Google. Instead they made a big investment in Linux running on large quantities of commodity x86 PC hardware, and building software on top of that to get the most out of it. That means things like combining workloads with different profiles onto the same servers, and cgroups kind of falls out of that. Other companies like Yahoo, Whatsapp, Netflix also followed interesting patterns of using strong understanding of how to be efficient on cheap hardware. Notably those three all were FreeBSD users at least in their early days.

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