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Pixar's Render Farm

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382 points brundolf | 1 comments | 02 Jan 21 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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shadowofneptune ◴[02 Jan 21 20:02 UTC] No.25615950[source]▶
It's good to know they care about optimization. I had the assumption that all CGI is a rather wasteful practice where you just throw more hardware at the problem.
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mathattack ◴[02 Jan 21 20:08 UTC] No.25616001[source]▶
In the end it’s still more profitable to hire performance engineers than hardware. For the last decade I’ve heard the “toss more HW” argument. It hasn’t held because the amount of compute and storage goes up too.
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theptip ◴[02 Jan 21 20:24 UTC] No.25616142[source]▶
In reality it’s never as simple as a single soundbite. If you are a startup with $1k/mo AWS bills, throwing more hardware at the problem can be orders of magnitude cheaper. If you are running resource-intensive workloads then at some point efficiency work becomes ROI-positive.

The reason the rule of thumb is to throw more hardware at the problem is that most (good) engineers bias towards wanting to make things performant, in my experience often beyond the point where it’s ROI positive. But of course you should not take that rule of thumb as a universal law, rather it’s another reminder of a cognitive bias to keep an eye on.

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1. mathattack ◴[03 Jan 21 02:28 UTC] No.25618774{3}[source]▶
Yes - context matters. This article is about Pixar where it pays to have someone think about performance. My data points are only companies of 50 people and higher - in those cases cloud consumption was the number 2 cost line item behind people. It matters there. In most cases the people who know cost performance tend to be good at fighting latency - you need the same skills.

This may not apply on smaller side projects or places where technology is secondary.