9 ms·

Why create bloat when it can be avoided? The 6kB server might be overkill but the other options in that article seem pretty good.

tluyben2 6y ago
A lot of companies that sell products (non open source ones anyway) actually try to bloat the binaries and deployments to make them look more significant. Many gigabyte installers are not that weird for some products, where I found (for fun as corp wise we cannot really care) the relevant software we are paying for to be a few mb and it doesn't need or even touch the rest the rest in the package for 99% of cases. But it seems/feels like you are paying those $100000s for some serious big software. When software was still delivered in physical boxes, I noticed the same thing and I even found products in the past where the .exe had megabytes of random data attached to it to make it look bigger. With Docker images it's all a lot easier to bloat things up and 'hide things'; I used to pack up our main product in a chroot tgz (this is early 2000s) with an installer, so I did not have to actually think about different linux distro's or installers; I know for a fact that some people bought our product over competitors because the installer was so large in size so it looks like better value. People told me when I asked them afterwards why they did not go for the competition. And this was not intentional; it just had a full Debian install in a chroot.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  This was something I never considered, but reminds me of the Larry Ellison tactic of never naming anything v1, or the concept that because something costs the most, it therefore must be the best.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Well, Oracle was (not sure if they still are) one of these companies. Some of their products we used in the past where artificially bloated and packed over multi CDs etc to make it all look bigger.
    - dolmen 6y ago
      Oracle was cofounded by... Larry Ellison.
      - lanstin 6y ago
        If all the readers don’t just know this, I am old and full of useless knowledge. A good read to understand Ellison’s persona in the 90s is here: https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53011.htm https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53011.htm Particularly flinging $100 bills at peasants and how RDBMS set pricing for their products. If you do have an implicit awareness of Oracle and their tactics, you will find this an amusing piece of nostalgia when people were starting to understand just how to build efficient and nice web sites in the 1997 time frame.
        daniellarusso 6y ago
        Speaking of 90s, remember the Greenspun AOLserver courses?
        lanstin 6y ago
        I loved Greenspun. So funny but so clear on how to make stuff work efficiently. My first threaded program I wrote professionally was a n extension to AOLserver to let the TCL layer speak the AOL flap protocol back to the backend. Got it working in few days but couldn’t get three simultaneous threads working for like a month. My boss at the time was like (once I finished it) don’t worry, software is late. My first project in the no threads server framework took six hours start to finish.

tluyben2 6y ago

A lot of companies that sell products (non open source ones anyway) actually try to bloat the binaries and deployments to make them look more significant. Many gigabyte installers are not that weird for some products, where I found (for fun as corp wise we cannot really care) the relevant software we are paying for to be a few mb and it doesn't need or even touch the rest the rest in the package for 99% of cases. But it seems/feels like you are paying those $100000s for some serious big software. When software was still delivered in physical boxes, I noticed the same thing and I even found products in the past where the .exe had megabytes of random data attached to it to make it look bigger. With Docker images it's all a lot easier to bloat things up and 'hide things'; I used to pack up our main product in a chroot tgz (this is early 2000s) with an installer, so I did not have to actually think about different linux distro's or installers; I know for a fact that some people bought our product over competitors because the installer was so large in size so it looks like better value. People told me when I asked them afterwards why they did not go for the competition. And this was not intentional; it just had a full Debian install in a chroot.

daniellarusso 6y ago
This was something I never considered, but reminds me of the Larry Ellison tactic of never naming anything v1, or the concept that because something costs the most, it therefore must be the best.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Well, Oracle was (not sure if they still are) one of these companies. Some of their products we used in the past where artificially bloated and packed over multi CDs etc to make it all look bigger.
  - dolmen 6y ago
    Oracle was cofounded by... Larry Ellison.
    - lanstin 6y ago
      If all the readers don’t just know this, I am old and full of useless knowledge. A good read to understand Ellison’s persona in the 90s is here: https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53011.htm https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53011.htm Particularly flinging $100 bills at peasants and how RDBMS set pricing for their products. If you do have an implicit awareness of Oracle and their tactics, you will find this an amusing piece of nostalgia when people were starting to understand just how to build efficient and nice web sites in the 1997 time frame.
      - daniellarusso 6y ago
        Speaking of 90s, remember the Greenspun AOLserver courses?
        lanstin 6y ago
        I loved Greenspun. So funny but so clear on how to make stuff work efficiently. My first threaded program I wrote professionally was a n extension to AOLserver to let the TCL layer speak the AOL flap protocol back to the backend. Got it working in few days but couldn’t get three simultaneous threads working for like a month. My boss at the time was like (once I finished it) don’t worry, software is late. My first project in the no threads server framework took six hours start to finish.