3 ms·
Lots of criticism of the dependency issues detailed here, but no one talking about the fact that musl looks to allocate roughly ~50% slower than glibc. For man
by danpalmer 7y ago
Lots of criticism of the dependency issues detailed here, but no one talking about the fact that musl looks to allocate roughly ~50% slower than glibc.
For many applications, particularly those that aren't written with low-level performance details in mind, this is likely to cause significant slowdowns (obviously not the full 50% as many things will be CPU bound, but still likely noticeable).
More generally, it seems that Alpine optimises for build/deployment, but glibc-based distros are going to be faster at runtime. While a fast build/deploy is nice, it's probably not worth it if it comes at a cost of significant runtime performance issues.
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoLike anything else, if you need to worry about speed - you should optimize. There are just as many people who will shit on Python for it's speed/scale capabilities as there are people who will point out "Well, it works for Instagram".
- chungus_khan 7y agoThe reason musl is slower is largely because the project's goals are about being lightweight and correct first and foremost, and this can often come into conflict with performance optimization. Python isn't the issue here, but almost any Python program will be heavily affected by this because the Python interpreter does a lot of allocation.
- danpalmer 7y agoThere are levels to caring about speed, and this could easily cause issues at a level above what they should, being a fairly low level detail (memory allocations). I work on a Python application where we don't care about memory allocations (we care about the number of database queries for example). Using musl may make memory allocations expensive enough (as they are 50% slower) that we may have to start paying attention to this in some areas of our code.