Always Measure One Level Deeper
Performance measurements often go wrong, reporting surface-level results that are more marketing than science.
John Ousterhout
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With scalable high-performance storage entirely in DRAM, RAMCloud will enable a new breed of data-intensive applications.
Technical Perspective: Is Scale Your Enemy, Or Is Scale Your Friend?
Scale has been the single most important force driving changes in system software over the last decade. Its impact is most obvious in the Web arena, however, it also impacts developers outside the Web. In this paper, scale comes from the large installed base of Windows and the correspondingly large number of error reports emanating from the installed base.
Sooner or later, every successful open-source software package will have one or more profitable businesses associated with it. For example, the Linux operating system is supported by several companies including Red Hat and Caldera; the GNU tools are supported by Cygnus; the Sendmail email delivery system is supported by Sendmail, Inc.; and the Tcl scripting language is supported by my company, Scriptics. This association between open-source software and business is not just a historical artifact, but a necessity. On its own, open-source software lacks essential ingredients for mainstream adoption. Commercial businesses tied to open-source packages provide these ingredients and help drive open-source packages into the mainstream. At the same time, they provide additional resources for developing the free components of the software.
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