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Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

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Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#21

Post by fauigerzigerk »

comice wrote: post #19
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #17

I think the real problem with Rails and similar frameworks is the culture of not giving a shit about performance. I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view. But there are people who have convinced themselves that as long as it scales out, it doesn't matter how many servers you have to run. And if the reason is that something t…

You'd never release a new version of anything that was slower? What if the new thing had 100x more (useful) features, should it still be as fast? Performance is a trade-off and sometimes it's worth compromising.

If I'm writing a framework on which others depend in ways I cannot entirely foresee, then the old features _must_ perform as well or better than before. No compromises.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#22

Post by fauigerzigerk »

philjackson wrote: post #20
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #17

I think the real problem with Rails and similar frameworks is the culture of not giving a shit about performance. I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view. But there are people who have convinced themselves that as long as it scales out, it doesn't matter how many servers you have to run. And if the reason is that something t…

Wouldn't we all be writing our web apps in C if we never allowed a performance degradation?

I don't see how you would come to that conclusion.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#23

Post by mrcalzone »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #17

I think the real problem with Rails and similar frameworks is the culture of not giving a shit about performance. I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view. But there are people who have convinced themselves that as long as it scales out, it doesn't matter how many servers you have to run. And if the reason is that something t…

I don't have the links now, but both Google and Amazon have concluded that faster page loads result in more sales/conversions. If you want to render the whole page in the browser in a couple of seconds (Google webmaster tools indicates the "fast" threshold at 1.5 seconds), spending over half a second on the server-side seems like a big penalty.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#24

Post by johnb »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #21
comice wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd never release a new version of anything that was slower? What if the new thing had 100x more (useful) features, should it still be as fast? Performance is a trade-off and sometimes it's worth compromising.

If I'm writing a framework on which others depend in ways I cannot entirely foresee, then the old features _must_ perform as well or better than before. No compromises.

That position of "no compromises" is probably why you're not writing a framework on which others depend. Complex software always involves compromises, especially general purpose frameworks used by a large population.

Even if you're saying that only in performance there can be no compromises (but generally people who say things like no compromises don't bound those statements) it will cause large compromises in other areas, such a future feature development or long term maintainability and readability.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#25

Post by DisposaBoy »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #21
comice wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd never release a new version of anything that was slower? What if the new thing had 100x more (useful) features, should it still be as fast? Performance is a trade-off and sometimes it's worth compromising.

If I'm writing a framework on which others depend in ways I cannot entirely foresee, then the old features _must_ perform as well or better than before. No compromises.

If that's taken as written then it's plain and simply impossible - no debate. I can understand that a significant slowdown might be a problem but otherwise it's just much ado about nothing really. What matters most is perceived performance degradation. I'd go as far as to presume? that most if not all people cannot actually the difference between an operation that takes (e.g) 100ms and one that takes 500ms yet when you look at the percentage difference it's clearly an unacceptable performance drop.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#28

Post by fauigerzigerk »

johnb wrote: post #24
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm writing a framework on which others depend in ways I cannot entirely foresee, then the old features _must_ perform as well or better than before. No compromises.

That position of "no compromises" is probably why you're not writing a framework on which others depend. Complex software always involves compromises, especially general purpose frameworks used by a large population. Even if you're saying that only in performance there can be no compromises (but generally people who say things like no compromises don't bound those statements) it will cause large compromises in other…

Perhaps you should leave comments about my personality to those who actually know me. But if you insist on talking about character traits, let me say this to you: People who don't know where to compromise and where not to comproise generally make bad software.

Re: Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough

#29

Post by asomiv »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #28
johnb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That position of "no compromises" is probably why you're not writing a framework on which others depend. Complex software always involves compromises, especially general purpose frameworks used by a large population. Even if you're saying that only in performance there can be no compromises (but generally people who say things like no compromises don't bound those statements) it will cause large compromises in other…

Perhaps you should leave comments about my personality to those who actually know me. But if you insist on talking about character traits, let me say this to you: People who don't know where to compromise and where not to comproise generally make bad software.

Compromises from whose point of view? One man's good compromise is another man's bad compromise.
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