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On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

antirez.com

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Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#61

Post by rimantas »

apu wrote: post #5

It would be interesting to see the results of this simple experiment for different web frameworks: almost empty template and no other processing => how many requests per second? If it's much slower than i/o times, something should probably be done about it. (BTW I completely agree with antirez's point.)

This would be much better experiment. Who does web apps on bare languages anymore? And any decent framework will have some caching implemented, so you don't render the same template if nothing changes.

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#62

Post by asharp »

Well, no.

Think about it this way: Speed is the number of requests/second a single server can process.

Scalability is the amount of computing power you lose when splitting a job amongst multiple machines.

Intuitively you can think of it like asymptotic complexity. You can have a really fast implementation of quick sort, but at a large enough input size it will be flattened by a very slow version of radix sort.

Similarly you can have the fastest web server on the planet, but if you scale poorly, at some number of nodes even the slowest albiet well scaling system will out perform you.

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#63

Post by rtomayko »

antirez wrote: post #56

I'm happy that I received so much feedbacks, thank you all! However I see a few comments that missed a bit the point, and this is probably my fault because I did not specified some very important thing: Once you substitute not just an hello world template, but a few templates N times (since you have N comments in the page), the performance starts to be so slow you can't serve more than about 10 requests per second, j…

omg please turn development mode off antirez. Are you trolling me?

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#64

Post by ot »

Funny.

In my freshman year (7 years ago) I was an efficiency and premature optimization zealot, despising anything that wasn't written in C/C++.

Then I met a hacker that told me how awesome dynamic language were (in particular Python and Lisp). I told him "but they are some 10-20 times slower than C!". And he replied "Yes, but it takes 10 times less time to code. If the outcome is not fast enough, you can spend the rest of the time optimizing". Since then, Python has been my language of choice, relegating C++ to the optimization of the (few) bottlenecks.

Why is this funny? Because that hacker was antirez :)

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#65

Post by asharp »

davidu wrote: post #17
fleitz wrote: post #13

Neither matter, what matters is profitability. It doesn't matter if you can serve 10,000 requests per second if the cost of that request exceeds what you're paid for it. For most sites ruby is profitable, the value add from ruby is decreased cycle time between releases which can increase the profitability of your site more than increasing the pages per second can. The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond…

1) AMZN and GOOG have proven that pageload speed does in fact directly relate to profitability. 2) Regarding "The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond a single server," you could make the same point that the vast majority of sites are not profitable either. It's a total non sequitur in either case. 3) Your point that it "costs less" to develop in Ruby which can increase the profitability of your site is…

As per point #3, remember that you amortize the cost of r&d along some payback period. As such it does effect your margins.

I do agree with your point though. Decreasing development time is the means to the end of making more money out of the product and making a greater return for your (money/time) investment.

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#66

Post by lazerepilasyon »

asharp wrote: post #65
davidu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) AMZN and GOOG have proven that pageload speed does in fact directly relate to profitability. 2) Regarding "The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond a single server," you could make the same point that the vast majority of sites are not profitable either. It's a total non sequitur in either case. 3) Your point that it "costs less" to develop in Ruby which can increase the profitability of your site is…

As per point #3, remember that you amortize the cost of r&d along some payback period. As such it does effect your margins. I do agree with your point though. Decreasing development time is the means to the end of making more money out of the product and making a greater return for your (money/time) investment.

http://www.lazerepilasyonsariyer.com

Re: On the web server scalability and speed are almost the same thing

#67

Post by lazerepilasyon »

asharp wrote: post #65
davidu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) AMZN and GOOG have proven that pageload speed does in fact directly relate to profitability. 2) Regarding "The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond a single server," you could make the same point that the vast majority of sites are not profitable either. It's a total non sequitur in either case. 3) Your point that it "costs less" to develop in Ruby which can increase the profitability of your site is…

As per point #3, remember that you amortize the cost of r&d along some payback period. As such it does effect your margins. I do agree with your point though. Decreasing development time is the means to the end of making more money out of the product and making a greater return for your (money/time) investment.

http://www.kadikoyepilasyon.com
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