Tech myth debunk thread

[wasab]

27 minutes ago, Kisai said:

16 servers with 4 cores/w 64GB each ($1575USD/ea Poweredge R240) = $25200

4 servers with 16 cores and 256GB ram ($7400 USD/ea Poweredge r6515) = $29600

And if servers are multithreaded, that just magically reduce the cost? Give me a break. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I don't know if it's a common misconception, but one that came to mind: Storage performance is all that matters in loading performance.

 

In some respect, yes, it is. The faster you can get something onto RAM, the faster the loading process can go. However, storage performance is only half the story, the other half is the processor. Just because the application's data is in RAM doesn't mean it's actually ready to use by the user. The processor has to initialize things before the application can be ready. In extreme cases, a faster processor with an HDD can match a slower processor with an SSD.

 

Think about it this way, Windows on my PC typically sits at around 1.5GB of RAM usage after a fresh boot. It lives on an NVMe drive capable of delivering 3GB/sec. So how come it still takes something like 5-10 seconds after POST to actually get to the login screen?

[Bombastinator]

53 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I don't know if it's a common misconception, but one that came to mind: Storage performance is all that matters in loading performance.

 

In some respect, yes, it is. The faster you can get something onto RAM, the faster the loading process can go. However, storage performance is only half the story, the other half is the processor. Just because the application's data is in RAM doesn't mean it's actually ready to use by the user. The processor has to initialize things before the application can be ready. In extreme cases, a faster processor with an HDD can match a slower processor with an SSD.

 

Think about it this way, Windows on my PC typically sits at around 1.5GB of RAM usage after a fresh boot. It lives on an NVMe drive capable of delivering 3GB/sec. So how come it still takes something like 5-10 seconds after POST to actually get to the login screen?

This leads to what may be a more common one: “SSD’s make everything faster.”  Saw this one recently with someone trying to “update” some ancient Celeron laptops with soldered CPUs because they were “too slow to use” It would make stuff load faster, but I didn’t think it would do much good other than that.  There’s only so much that can be done with ancient celeron  laptops.