jspthrowaway

It's not a throttle, it's the "physical" capacity of the "interface". If you're on an instance with gigabit connectivity and you're doing 1 Gb/s of EBS I/O, other network chatter will suffer, probably fairly dramatically. That's why the high-I/O instances have 10 gigabit connectivity, as I understand it.

Happy to be proven wrong but this is based on a year or so of experience dealing with EBS. You can't see the EBS traffic in your tools (at least that I've been able to find), which complicates things.

It's all kinds of different on VPC instances, therefore I suspect the network interface model -- and possibly EBS connectivity -- is different on those. So, who knows? I'd kill for Amazon to be more forthcoming here so I could understand the infrastructure running my fleet, but, I don't and they aren't.

Ephemeral is definitely not EBS, as its I/O does not contribute to saturating an instance's network connection (I've tested that). EBS has a ceiling for throughput (the instance's network throughput) and competes with your other network traffic, which is interesting for database workloads for obvious reasons. In addition, every single benchmark I've seen run reports ephemeral behaving very differently from EBS.

As ephemeral disappears when you stop an instance (presumably, when the system is given the opportunity to relocate your instance to another machine), I've always suspected that ephemeral storage was part of local disks on the virtual host's chassis -- as opposed to a SAN or other kind of network-attached storage. As such, you probably end up with the same unpredictable performance you find in all virtualized resources, since it is very unlikely that Amazon is giving you your own storage.

Before benchmarking ephemeral storage you have to pre-warm it, which might have contributed to your findings. Ephemeral is worlds better than EBS, particularly in outage scenarios; if I could convince everybody on planet Earth to stop using EBS, it would be a noble cause.

> Well Objective C is a separate language entirely.

Not quite; Objective-C is a superset of C. You can write pure C and compile it as Objective-C all day long.

This is an important point because people think their C knowledge doesn't translate to Objective-C, mainly because people say things like "it's entirely different". At its core, it really isn't -- the superset syntax becomes straight C underneath.

Ruling out a product and dismissing it based on projected ROI is not criticism. That would be called "making a business decision," not providing constructive feedback.

I didn't put words in his mouth, he wrote that they were lying to managers and possibly being deceptive. You also misquoted me, which is ironic given your criticism.

Your postulation is unwarranted, by the way, since my posts have been going up and down based upon their depth in the thread. The top comments have been upvoted more than the lower ones, and the lower ones have actually been muted somewhat. I would actually suggest that people are reading the thread and voting appropriately, and probably aren't making it deepest into the thread.

Your sweeping characterization of mindless Hacker News voters acting by whim is disconcerting, to say the least. That we're so fixated on the voting here when karma is absolutely worthless is equally annoying. I am, however, intrigued by the shift from very light gray back to legible that has taken place on his comments since the beginning of this meta discussion (starting with ww520's remark); there might be something to what you're saying, which is that people are acting based upon what others are saying -- that's troubling.

People who have never used software should be critical of "here's what our software can do with inexperienced hands, maybe you'll do better"? I'd much rather default to giving benefit of the doubt than assuming everything sucks before I've even touched it. Reminded of people who say they don't like exotic food but have never eaten it.

I think the lowest opinion on the totem pole is one formed by assumptions (based upon personal experience with an area) used to reflect upon something from the hip. "I'm pretty versed in game development, and what these people are doing is stupid based on my world view."

Dismissal is not constructive criticism. There's a sizable difference between "meh, nothing to see here" (which is the original comment in this thread) and "here's how this could be better".