

James Hamilton: Resource Consumption Shaping (shift your load around and save money) - wmf
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/17/ResourceConsumptionShaping.aspx

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jbyers
I imagine many startups with batch or non-time-critical processes do this sort
of shaping naturally. It strikes me as a 'crontab' mentality:

"What time should I run job X every night? Whenever our load is lowest, and
when nothing else is running."

At Wikispaces we do this for many GB of nightly log parsing and data
aggregation. We're also looking at running classes of non-critical
notification jobs during nightly lulls. As for workload mixing, a good example
in our environment is memcached and MogileFS. Memcached servers need as much
RAM as possible and a bit of CPU. MogileFS storage nodes need as much disk as
possible and a bit of CPU. They go great together.

