phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Question about saturating the memory bandwidth

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Message-ID: <52DA6237.1020601@bindshell.nl>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 03:15:03 -0800
From: Jeremi Gosney <epixoip@...dshell.nl>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Question about saturating the memory bandwidth

On 1/18/2014 1:47 AM, Solar Designer wrote:
> There's no problem with saturating the memory bandwidth for password
> hashing on busy web servers.

I think I'm inclined to disagree with this. But that's not to say you
are necessarily wrong.

First, I think it's a bit too broad of a statement. It's hard to say
what a "webserver" is now, or what it will be in 10 years. For a
traditional webserver where you're just serving pages off disk, then
yes, there's technical justification for saturating the memory bus. But
large websites especially make heavy use of in-memory caching and
key-value stores like Redis, mod_mem_cache, memcached, etc, and a
function such as this could very likely have a negative impact on
performance.

Now one my say that a large site would likely have the financial
resources to run dedicated caching servers, or dedicated authentication
servers, or whatever. And that's probably true. It's not hard to scale
up and scale out when you have money. But what I'm concerned about is
how well this will scale down. Which leads me to my second concern: a
webserver may not even be running on dedicated hardware. Webservers
running on a hypervisor with other memory-intensive virtual machines, or
even an oversubscribed hypervisor where virtual machines do not have
dedicated cores, could become problematic as well.

So that's why I'm not so sure we can make a blanket statement like this.

Additionally, I think the "convincing folks" part of Peter's statement
is the key.  Even if we do have sufficient technical justification for
saturating the memory bus, convincing users that it's totally cool to do
so is another story. Gaining widespread adoption will already be our
biggest challenge regardless of the function we select as the winner,
and a function that saturates memory bandwidth may be an even harder sell.