The first question I got about my C10M Shmoocon presentation was: "But doesn't wimpy cores solve scale?". The idea here is that instead of a small number of "beefy" servers, that we build a large number of "wimpy" servers using ARM or Atom processors. These are the low-speed/low-power processors found in mobile phones.
There is no power advantage
A common misconception is that ARM processors are more power efficient. They aren't. They consume the same watts per computation as other processors. Instead, they achieve their goal of low-power for mobile devices simply by being slower. When enough wimpy ARM processors are combined to equal the performance of a single beefy Intel x86 processor, the combination uses just as much power.
Or more. All the interconnections with Ethernet, SATA, RAM, drives, and USB consume a lot of power per device. That's what's interesting about the Raspberry Pi hobbyist computers based on ARM. The model "B" that adds a USB port and Ethernet port consumes over twice the electrical power as the model "A".
Wimpy ARM computers fighting against the dominant Intel x86 sparks our imagination like flying cars. It sounds really cool, but the math just doesn't pan out.
The scalability advantage
While wimpy ARM servers don't have a power advantage, they may have a scalability advantage. As we all know, Apache doesn't scale with a lot of connections to the server. Doubling the number of CPU cores inside a server won't help. But, doubling the number of servers will.
In other words, consider an Apache server that handles 5k connections. Doubling the number cores within the server will only increase that to 6k connections. However, two separate servers can handle 5k connections each, or 10k total.
Thus, many wimpy ARM servers running Apache is preferable to a single beefy server.
However, the same effect is done with VMs on a beefy server. If you reach Apache's scalability problems, just create multiple VMs on the same same server. So this isn't necessary an inherent advantage of wimpiness.
In any case, with our wimpy Apache array, we still need a load balancer in front it it. That's going to be a beefy computer running something like nginx. It's likely that this server is beefy enough to just run our application in the first place, had we written it in a scalable asynchronous manner to begin with instead of Apache threads. In other words, the wimpy servers haven't so much solve the scalability problem so much as moved it around.
Scalability is not just Apache
Lots of other things than just Apache have scalability issues, and not all of them can be broken down into multiple servers.
Consider the .com DNS server. There are 100 million domains. Assuming 100 bytes per domain, that means these DNS servers need 10 gigabytes of RAM. That's not possible with today's 32-bit ARM servers. Thus, instead of thousands of ARM servers using anycast, you still need a smaller number of beefier servers.
Conclusion
While scalable servers like nginx are rapidly becoming more popular, Apache is still the dominant web platform. Arrays of wimpy computers (or VMs on beefy computers) will be a way of dealing with Apache. The smarter alternative is just write better software.
