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How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

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Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#161

Post by btilly »

stalcottsmith wrote: post #131

I've seen a lot of dumb Rails server configs and even dumber usages of Rails without any tuning at all. With a couple weeks or a month of work I could shrink the hosting fees or resources consumed by a factor of 5 out of most Rails apps that are sitting up around 30 servers... and probably a factor of 10. Leaving aside whatever rookie or even intermediate mistakes were made in their Ruby code or their database, this…

Your inability to understand their clear description of a basic cascading failure mode under load speaks poorly of your actual knowledge and experience. Given that, I have to take everything else that you say with a large helping of salt.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#162

Post by tmzt »

DASD wrote: post #81
azakai wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and Go are not similar or competing. They are both new, but aside from that the differences are huge. So if a project uses one, that doesn't mean the other was a possibility for that project too.

Indeed they are not similar but wildly different tools are often used in a similar or competing use cases(eg. the blog's post of the company using Ruby and conversion to Go). I had asked because if you were to reverse the usage do you think Google is likely using much Rust since it is developing Go? Just to clarify, I see a bright future for both languages.

It would be interesting to see Rust used in Android in some of the parts that are now C or C++.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#163

Post by TresAmiga »

jbooth wrote: post #73
methehack wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey OP! I appreciate your sharing. Since you came from ruby and we're on the topic of the language itself, I'd appreciate your impression of how well Go supports collections. Is there or could one write something like http://underscorejs.org/ ? Can you do this kind of thing? [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].reject {|i| i I did the go tutorial the other day and I became a little worried that one would not be able to do this kind of th…

Go has first-class functions, so you could write a library do the same thing with, yes, a few more declarations around it. In your example, .map { |i| i + 9 } is .map( func(i int) int { return i + 9 }), or .map(myFuncDefinedElsewhere) in most real-world scenarios. As a commenter upthread pointed out, Go and serverside Javascript are aimed at very different use cases and audiences.

Wrong and you know it. Go does not have generics so you have to use void* (interface{}) and casting. It ends up being about an order of magnitude uglier and more verbose. Which is why map, fold, etc don't exist in Go.

You go fanatics are incorrigible.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#164

Post by trungonnews »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #128
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". Sure, I happen to write more C++, Python, and C than anything else, but I've dabbled in just about everything and could reach comfortable proficiency in a matter of weeks. Most of programming and all of computer science is universal. Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default.

> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now. My experience is that it is impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments. You can remain familiar with other environments but you don't have the time to be an expert. While I sometimes switch between C-family lang…

Go as of today doesn't have too many libraries available. So there is really nothing to learn besides the language itself.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#165

Post by taeric »

ikeepforgetting wrote: post #117
FooBarWidget wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abstractions are not necessarily slow. The BSD socket API is an abstraction over sending raw TCP/IP packets to your Ethernet card, but you're not going to get a whole lot more performance out of accessing your Ethernet card directly.

Well, they're always slower than not having them. Having a few layers on top of each other starts to add up. It's very easy to lose track of the bottlenecks of 2 or more layers below the one you're working in. There is a reason HTTP.sys runs in kernel space and BSD sockets don't. And there's a reason both of them are slower than XMLHttpRequests. PS. The fact that you can point to one (or a few) efficient abstractions…

Just no. Some abstractions are light years faster than not having them. To the point that this is a silly statement. Consider the elementary abstraction of an array. The slightly less elementary one of a map.

More close to heart, the abstraction that source control gives you. Imagine not having git (or whatever tool) and thinking you will compare this weeks code with what was available last week. Now just do the same based on the changes introduced by a single developer. Trivial with the abstraction of source control. Hella tough without.

So, no, just because there are layers of abstractions does not automatically mean things are going to be slow.

All of that said, I can see and ultimately agree with your point. Excessive abstraction can be bad. Unfortunately, I think the jury is out on where the hell that line is. (Likely they are distracted with other pointless questions while others are out solving problems.)

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#166

Post by TresAmiga »

treeder wrote: post #10
jabagonuts wrote: post #3

Out of curiousity, I would be interested to know which version/patches of ruby you were using. With ruby I'm used to running out of memory on servers long before running out of CPU. Of course, most of our workloads are IO bound, so that may be the diffent.

This was on Ruby 1.9, 2010 era. No patches. Memory was definitely a concern and probably contributed to some of it. Just to note though, after a machine was taken offline by the load balancer, it would generally come back to life.

Memory "probably contributed to it"? You don't even know why the old version was slow but you want to credit golang with making it fast? Hype much? The lack of critical thinking here on Hacker News is astounding.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#167

Post by zobzu »

rektide wrote: post #112
zobzu wrote: post #41

It's not really "go" that makes the difference. it's how the runtimes and frameworks are used and/or made. frameworks on top of frameworks, all being over engineered, with poor understanding of what the system actually does, result in super slow apps on top, that you generally go to aws to scale. It's not the first time that I see people reducing a dozen servers that were "always maxed out" by a couple of servers "th…

I'm very sympathetic to your tech-on-tech-on-tech-on-tech hogwashery promulgated by open sourcers & vendors prosteltyzing their wonderful solutions and the other acculturation factors that permits developers approaches other than trying & seeing & exploring- That said, you are wrong. I'm not a Go user and I don't care for it, but Go is fundamentally different and better than most runtimes. Go has it's own green threa…

You probably stopped at the half of my comment, because I did write Go had advantages (over the likes of ruby&friends anyway).

But it's the wrong way to think about it, that's why it's in the second half of the comment. Else, people will just use go because they're told it's the cool kid on the block. WRONG way of thinking.

That is all :)

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#169

Post by rgbrgb »

bingobangobongo wrote: post #160
gilgoomesh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. It depends if you're going to spend years training someone or if you need an expert right now. My experience is that it is impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments. You can remain familiar with other environments but you don't have the time to be an expert. While I sometimes switch between C-family lang…

> impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments And the crappier your language and libraries, the more time it takes to be an "expert."

By this definition, Ruby/Rails are pretty crappy (I kind of disagree). As a newcomer, the amount of stuff going on in a Rails app and the stack trace when there's an error are pretty overwhelming. Meanwhile, people expound on how simple and elegant Rails is. Lately I've been thinking that this is because those people started using it 5 years ago when it was small and their knowledge has built incrementally with the environment.

My other theory is that it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer because like C (and unlike Python in most cases), importing functionality from another file is implicit. That is, when you 'require' a bunch of files, there's no indication which functions are coming from where. For me, this is one of the things Python solves marvelously (it's generally considered bad form to 'import *').

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#170

Post by paddyforan »

jbooth wrote: post #73
methehack wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey OP! I appreciate your sharing. Since you came from ruby and we're on the topic of the language itself, I'd appreciate your impression of how well Go supports collections. Is there or could one write something like http://underscorejs.org/ ? Can you do this kind of thing? [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].reject {|i| i I did the go tutorial the other day and I became a little worried that one would not be able to do this kind of th…

Go has first-class functions, so you could write a library do the same thing with, yes, a few more declarations around it. In your example, .map { |i| i + 9 } is .map( func(i int) int { return i + 9 }), or .map(myFuncDefinedElsewhere) in most real-world scenarios. As a commenter upthread pointed out, Go and serverside Javascript are aimed at very different use cases and audiences.

I thought this would be a fun exercise, so I implemented the Go equivalent. Can anyone get it to fewer lines? It abandoned all pretenses of readability long ago.

http://play.golang.org/p/M5VaeIgQ-q

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