3 ms·

Well if 80% of the web was running on ruby there wouldn't be any difference. Most people don't understand that 99% of performance issues are not caused by lang

Well if 80% of the web was running on ruby there wouldn't be any difference. Most people don't understand that 99% of performance issues are not caused by language performance but by bad architecture and bad developers. Always choose the best tool for the job, you rarely get to that scale and quality of software design that only the raw language performance is left to be optimized :)

return1 7y ago
Tbh most of it is wordpress, and that is not terribly inefficient.
- cntainer 7y ago
  I haven't touched wordpress in 8 years, but with old codebases you always inherit a lot of bad design decisions that always have an impact on general performance. Maybe the wordpress guys have done a great job in rewriting the internals and cleaning things up in the last years, I wouldn't know, I don't follow their progress.
deleted 7y ago
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smolder 7y ago
There absolutely would be a difference. IME, people take this "performance is not a major concern when choosing a stack" thing a little too far and apply it too broadly, often without ever having benchmarked anything. When I can handle 300+ requests per second in one implementation and only 50 in another on the same hardware, that's going to be a big difference in costs that matters for everyone except fledgling businesses. I've seen 5-10x differences in performance between languages with none of it being attributable to anything the programmer did being suboptimal --just the language/standard libraries/runtime.
- cntainer 7y ago
  I agree with your costs argument, but my point is you can rarely blame the language. If we bring the frameworks in the discussion it gets even more complicated. If you build a Rails or Laravel app in the same way you would build a Java app, the Rails/Laravel app will be dead slow. And I've seen that happen. But if you know what you're doing you with Rails/Laravel it will be a long time before you say: we should rewrite this in Go/Rust/Erlang. The main criteria for me when choosing a tool for the job is: how well does the team know the tool? can they use it at full potential? I've been involved in java project with 20k monthly cloud costs. Most of the workload is handled in the background by consumers that pull messages from RabbitMQ. I'm pretty sure I could rebuild that with any language while actually reducing the costs because the bottleneck is not the code but the architecture. Would it matter if I would rewrite it in Java instead pf Python or Ruby, in terms of performance, yes, if we need to consider other things, like speed of development, etc it gets complicated again. :)
- cutler 7y ago
  5x-10x differences only exist between statically compiled and dynamically compiled languages. The differences in performance between dynamic languages is marginal. As for Ruby it's now slightly faster than Python for most things except C-based numerics.
  - smolder 7y ago
    When you start mixing in things like random number generators, different methods of string manipulation, different data structures and so on, there can be pretty dramatic differences in performance within each category. (static or dynamic) Every language has building blocks that come with it that are far from equal.

return1 7y ago

Tbh most of it is wordpress, and that is not terribly inefficient.

cntainer 7y ago
I haven't touched wordpress in 8 years, but with old codebases you always inherit a lot of bad design decisions that always have an impact on general performance. Maybe the wordpress guys have done a great job in rewriting the internals and cleaning things up in the last years, I wouldn't know, I don't follow their progress.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

smolder 7y ago

There absolutely would be a difference. IME, people take this "performance is not a major concern when choosing a stack" thing a little too far and apply it too broadly, often without ever having benchmarked anything. When I can handle 300+ requests per second in one implementation and only 50 in another on the same hardware, that's going to be a big difference in costs that matters for everyone except fledgling businesses. I've seen 5-10x differences in performance between languages with none of it being attributable to anything the programmer did being suboptimal --just the language/standard libraries/runtime.

cntainer 7y ago
I agree with your costs argument, but my point is you can rarely blame the language. If we bring the frameworks in the discussion it gets even more complicated. If you build a Rails or Laravel app in the same way you would build a Java app, the Rails/Laravel app will be dead slow. And I've seen that happen. But if you know what you're doing you with Rails/Laravel it will be a long time before you say: we should rewrite this in Go/Rust/Erlang. The main criteria for me when choosing a tool for the job is: how well does the team know the tool? can they use it at full potential? I've been involved in java project with 20k monthly cloud costs. Most of the workload is handled in the background by consumers that pull messages from RabbitMQ. I'm pretty sure I could rebuild that with any language while actually reducing the costs because the bottleneck is not the code but the architecture. Would it matter if I would rewrite it in Java instead pf Python or Ruby, in terms of performance, yes, if we need to consider other things, like speed of development, etc it gets complicated again. :)
cutler 7y ago
5x-10x differences only exist between statically compiled and dynamically compiled languages. The differences in performance between dynamic languages is marginal. As for Ruby it's now slightly faster than Python for most things except C-based numerics.
- smolder 7y ago
  When you start mixing in things like random number generators, different methods of string manipulation, different data structures and so on, there can be pretty dramatic differences in performance within each category. (static or dynamic) Every language has building blocks that come with it that are far from equal.