www.nickhodge.com

In deploy­ing the small Ruby on Rails applic­a­tion on an old Dell 8200 run­ning Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the applic­a­tion would per­form under load.

Apache comes with a great little applic­a­tion meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slash­dots your web applic­a­tion, and gives you a nice meas­ure (in pages per second, amongst other things).

Meas­ur­ing the per­form­ance of the Dell 8200 using the Mon­grel web server vs. my Mac Book Pro run­ning the same ver­sions of all the stack of soft­ware (except, obvi­ously the OS) — the speed dif­fer­ence is 16x. Now as these machines are about 4 years apart from each other in the Intel-world, 16 is exactly what you would expect: the per­form­ance doubles every year. Very wise pre­dic­tion from 1970 that con­tin­ues to drive this whole crazy industry.

What has this to do with Com­pound­ing interest? Exactly 22 years ago one of my kind, late great-uncles star­ted a bank account for be with the grand deposit of AU$200. Which I’ve sub­sequently for­got­ten about.

Mum found the Deposit book­let some­where, and sent it to me. Today that account is worth about $640. This is a com­poun­ded interest rate of 5.4%. In another 22 years it will be worth AU$2,023 at the same rate.

Now, if it had com­poun­ded at Moore’s Law over the last 22 years: the amount in the bank would be a grand $6,276,211,921,800.

Now I know why I work in IT, not finance!