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Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of pro

Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm

phonon 7y ago
Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?
- dangoor 7y ago
  That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.
  - phonon 7y ago
    Oh, because you use App Engine Standard? Did you reconsider being locked into App Engine? What about App Engine Flexible? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runtimes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runt... PyPy might give you a 2-4x speedup, and if it wasn't for App Engine Standard, might be as easy as dropping it in instead of CPython, while Go is a total rewrite. Seems strange you wouldn't at least do a deeper dive on PyPy...
    - dangoor 7y ago
      The fundamental reason that we started on this track is the need to get off of Python 2, which has reached EOL and from which the community is moving away. Because of APIs we're using and such, it's not easy to switch to Python 3. Because of API changes in GAE, moving to PyPy on Flex is also still difficult and doesn't solve the problem of still being on Python 2. Performance is one of several important reasons for the move to Go, and not the top reason.
malux85 7y ago
Very cool and interesting thanks for your response!
samrosea 7y ago
>Go is better supported than Kotlin by a broad range of editors Lol is this a joke when Kotlin is literally made by IntelliJ?

phonon 7y ago

Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?

dangoor 7y ago
That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.
- phonon 7y ago
  Oh, because you use App Engine Standard? Did you reconsider being locked into App Engine? What about App Engine Flexible? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runtimes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runt... PyPy might give you a 2-4x speedup, and if it wasn't for App Engine Standard, might be as easy as dropping it in instead of CPython, while Go is a total rewrite. Seems strange you wouldn't at least do a deeper dive on PyPy...
  - dangoor 7y ago
    The fundamental reason that we started on this track is the need to get off of Python 2, which has reached EOL and from which the community is moving away. Because of APIs we're using and such, it's not easy to switch to Python 3. Because of API changes in GAE, moving to PyPy on Flex is also still difficult and doesn't solve the problem of still being on Python 2. Performance is one of several important reasons for the move to Go, and not the top reason.

malux85 7y ago

Very cool and interesting thanks for your response!

samrosea 7y ago

>Go is better supported than Kotlin by a broad range of editors Lol is this a joke when Kotlin is literally made by IntelliJ?