Engineer to meetFacebook’s parent company has revealed how they were able to offer free memory using a software solution called Transparent Memory Offloading (TMO).
It’s part now Linux The kernel and, in short, automatically offload data to other storage layers (such as Samsung’s CX memory expander) which is less expensive and more energy efficient than memory.
Savings are significant; Millions of TMOs are running on Facebook Server For more than a year, the server saves about one-third of the memory. Although it may be insignificant across dozens or even hundreds of servers, FacebookIts huge scale presents a unique challenge.
Analysis: Facebook’s huge appetite for RAM
The world’s largest social network has nearly three billion monthly active users and millions of servers spread across 21 locations worldwide. If each server carries an average of 128GB of RAM, that amounts to 256 million GB (or 256PB). RAM Which, at an average cost of $ 4 per GB (DDR4 ECC RAM), is worth about $ 1 billion worth of memory. It is estimated that Facebook has at least two million servers (Facebook’s blog quoted “Million Servers” in early July 2018), the actual number could be much higher.
The numbers presented by the team working at TMO show that memory costs, compressed RAM, and SSD accounting are less than 11% for one-third of Meta’s server bill. More worryingly, the burden of RAM (as a percentage of total infrastructure) has more than doubled since Facebook launched its first-generation server (it currently ranks fourth).
TMO acceptance comes with some errors; Most significantly, a deterioration in performance. But the benefits of energy and memory storage outweigh the disadvantages associated with hardware improvements and future iterations (e.g. faster). SSD Or CXL drive) will offer more mitigation.
