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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 02:26:01 -0000 (UTC)
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On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 11:55:22 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

> If you're doing something that is mostly read-only and easy to
> parallelize, then it makes sense to use a farm of cheap PCs. But if you
> are a bank or an airline, you need to be able to lock your database so
> that you debit a bank account or sell a plane seat exactly once.  There
> is a rule of thumb that the cost of locking something grows roughly as
> the square of the number of things contending for the lock.

Remember that the number of users actually buying a product at any given 
time is only a small proportion (say 1%) of the number of users currently 
accessing the site.

So, by that same square law, the locking problem is only 1/10,000 as bad 
as one might think.