About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”

About PayPal's Node vs Java “fight”
developer-blog.cloudbees.com

Don’t build your app on top of a pile of crap in-house framework. """

I've always found framework overhead and especially tech debt to be the largest contributors to performance issues. Especially when said frameworks have lots of ways to do things and they're not all the best way to do it.

Modern JVM development starts to look a lot like Sinatra -- you don't get a lot baked in, but you probably didn't need it anyways.

> Under minimum load the best page rendering time was 233ms

Regarding the node.js performance:

> Under minimum load the best page rendering time was 249ms

What the heck are they doing that takes 250ms that could possibly be app code related? That's a lot of CPU usage if its actually doing CPU-bound work. Since these are web apps that's obviously not the case. The request time is going to be mostly waiting for external resources (DB, message queue, etc).

Without knowing how much time is spent on those external requests these numbers are meaningless.

Language choice is no where near as important as your DB-access patterns (and more generally DB performance, caching, etc).

If every request you process involves serially accessing a 50-100ms external resource four or five times then it will always take 250ms (though you could increase parallelism of multiple requests if done right).