You probably weren't there when servers were running for many days at a time.

By the time you joined and benchmarked these systems, the continuous rolling deployment had taken over. If you're restarting the server every few hours, of course the memory fragmentation isn't much of an issue.

> But you were unable to show an advantage at the system level when challenged on it, and that's what matters.

You mean 5 years after I stopped working on the kernel and the underlying system had changed?

I don't recall ever talking to you on the matter.

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jcalvinowens 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> By the time you joined and benchmarked these systems, the continuous rolling deployment had taken over

Nope, I started in 2014.

> I don't recall ever talking to you on the matter.

I recall. You refused to believe the benchmark results and made me repeat the test, then stopped replying after I did :)

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adsharma 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The patches were written in 2011 and published in 2012. They did what they were supposed to at the time.

For the peanut gallery: this is a manifestation of an internal eng culture at fb that I wasn't particularly fond of. Celebrating that "I killed X" and partying about it.

You didn't reply to the main point: did you benchmark a server that was running several days at a time? Reasonable people can disagree about whether this a good deployment strategy or not. I tend to believe that there are many places which want to deploy servers and run for months if not days.

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alexgartrell 3 hours ago | parent [-]

For the peanut gallery more: I worked with both of these guys at Meta on this.

The "servers are only on for a few hours" thing was like never true so I have no idea where that claim is coming from. The web performance test took more than a few hours to run alone and we had way more aggressive soaks for other workloads.

My recollection was that "write zeroes" just became a cheaper operation between '12 and '14.

A fun fact to distract from the awkwardness: a lot of the kernel work done in the early days was exceedingly scrappy. The port mapping stuff for memcached UDP before SO_REUSEPORT for example. FB binaries couldn't even run on vanilla linux a lot of the time. Over the next several years we put a TON of effort in getting as close to mainline as possible and now Meta is one of the biggest drivers of Linux development.

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adsharma 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[ Edit: "servers" in this context meant the HHVM server processes, not the physical server which of course had a longer uptime ]

People got promoted for continuous deployment

https://engineering.fb.com/2017/08/31/web/rapid-release-at-m...

I think it's fair to say the hardware changed, the deployment strategy changed and the patches were no longer relevant, so we stopped applying them.

When I showed up, there were 100+ patches on top of a 2009 kernel tree. I reduced the size to about 10 or so critical patches, rebased them at a 6 months cadence over 2-3 years. Upstreamed a few.

Didn't go around saying those old patches were bad ideas and I got rid of them. How you say it matters.

	▲	alexgartrell 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The linked article says they decided to do CD in 2016 fwiw so that's not inconsistent with what I said. You reduced the number of patches a lot and also pushed very hard to get us to 3.0 after we sat on 2.6.38 ~forever. Which was very appreciated, btw. We built the whole plan going forward based on this work. I'm not arguing that anyone should be nice to anyone or not (it's a waste of breath when it comes to Linux). I'm just saying that the benchmarking was thorough and that contemporary 2014 hardware could zero pages fast.

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eduction 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I use Facebook and Instagram and think you all suck. Slagging each other in public. Grow tf up.

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nullpoint420 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why I love hacker news. I learn so much from these moments.

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danudey 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Like "never work at Meta unless you can out-toxic your coworkers".

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__turbobrew__ an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yea I knew meta was toxic, but publicly beefing over something over a decade ago is a whole other matter. I can’t even remember what I was working on 10 years ago, and even if I did I wouldn’t be bringing people down that much later.

	▲	baby an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The problem is a lot of very strong engineers are also very difficult to work with. I worked at Meta too and can tell you the other side of the coin is that people who were too toxic could get canned as well!

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CamperBob2 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Like "Hey, I wonder if Conway's Law works both ways. Huh. Wow. It looks like that is indeed the case."

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integricho 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I came here for the article, stayed for the drama.