A cynical view on needing SSDs in all your machines in the future
Let's start with my tweets:
@thatcks: Dear Firefox Nightly: doing ten+ minutes of high disk IO on startup before you even start showing me my restored session is absurd.
@thatcks: Clearly the day is coming when using a SSD is going be not merely useful but essential to get modern programs to perform decently.
I didn't say this just because programs are going to want to do more and more disk IO over time. Instead, I said it because of a traditional developer behavior, namely that developers mostly assess how fast their work is based on how it runs on their machines and developer machines are generally very beefy ones. At this point it's extremely likely that most developer machines have decently fast SSDs (and for good reason), which means that it's actually going to be hard for developers to notice they've written code that basically assumes a SSD and only runs acceptably on it (either in general or when some moderate corner case triggers).
SSDs exacerbate this problem by being not just fast in general but especially hugely faster at random IO than traditional hard drives. If you accidentally write something that is random IO heavy (or becomes so under some circumstances, perhaps as you scale the size of the database up) but only run it on a SSD based system, you might not really notice. Run that same thing on a HD based one (with a large database) and it will grind to a halt for ten minutes.
(Today I don't think we have profiling tools for disk IO the way we do for CPU usage by code, so even if a developer wanted to check for this their only option is to find a machine with a HD and try things out. Perhaps part of the solution will be an 'act like a HD' emulation layer for software testing that does things like slowing down random IO. Of course it's much more likely that people will just say 'buy SSDs and stop bugging us', especially in a few years.)
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