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I'm very much in favour of seeing performance as a key part of the development of any dynamic, interpreted language. (I single out dynamic languages because in

I'm very much in favour of seeing performance as a key part of the development of any dynamic, interpreted language. (I single out dynamic languages because in most typed, compiled languages, fast execution speed comes for free.) However, David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of Basecamp and creator or Ruby-on-Rails, has this interesting take on the cost of running Ruby for their business. Make of it what you will: Only 15% of the Basecamp operations budget is spent on Ruby (2019) https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operations-budget-is-spent-on-ruby/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operation...

multiplegeorges 5y ago
While I agree that the cost of "Ruby" gets dwarfed when running a larger business that uses it, I think it's really important to the larger ecosystem around Ruby that this low-level research/work happens. It's also really great to see large companies like Shopify invest in such low-level things, and not just on gems/changes that directly touch their business.
davidw 5y ago
Sure, that's a really important point, but if you get it mostly 'for free', you can - at the margin - expand the kinds of businesses where Ruby makes sense.
riffraff 5y ago
I mostly agree with the argument, but it's worth noting that a faster runtime may itself results in cutting the other 85% of costs, i.e. you don't need to complicate your architecture to deal with performance issues, nor hire more ops people to manage more servers etc..
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  Yeah, that DHH article has one sentence doing a lot of work: "Whether we run on Python, PHP, Rust, Go, C++, or whatever, we’d still need databases, we’d still need search, we’d still need to store files." It's not clear that's true (as in yes you'd probably still need all of those things at a high level, but would you need as much of them and would you need them out of process on another machine?). If magically your programming language gave you enough performance that a single binary + SQLite served all your needs and stuff like caches, message buses, and the like were completely unnecessary that'd radically change your ops budget. Of course that is truly magical, but then again there are quite a lot of papers that demonstrate well-crafted single binary services outperforming heterogenous complex clusters with orders of magnitude more compute resources.
ksec 5y ago
It is probably higher than that given your ORM / ActiveRecord Performance directly impact DB cost. But the point still stands at ~20%. But again, it only works for specific type of Web Apps. Those that require lots of traffic to generate relatively smaller amount of revenue, running on Freemium model wouldn't work because your cost / user are far higher. And these Web Apps / Site power 90% of the internet.

multiplegeorges 5y ago

While I agree that the cost of "Ruby" gets dwarfed when running a larger business that uses it, I think it's really important to the larger ecosystem around Ruby that this low-level research/work happens. It's also really great to see large companies like Shopify invest in such low-level things, and not just on gems/changes that directly touch their business.

davidw 5y ago

Sure, that's a really important point, but if you get it mostly 'for free', you can - at the margin - expand the kinds of businesses where Ruby makes sense.

riffraff 5y ago

I mostly agree with the argument, but it's worth noting that a faster runtime may itself results in cutting the other 85% of costs, i.e. you don't need to complicate your architecture to deal with performance issues, nor hire more ops people to manage more servers etc..

dwohnitmok 5y ago
Yeah, that DHH article has one sentence doing a lot of work: "Whether we run on Python, PHP, Rust, Go, C++, or whatever, we’d still need databases, we’d still need search, we’d still need to store files." It's not clear that's true (as in yes you'd probably still need all of those things at a high level, but would you need as much of them and would you need them out of process on another machine?). If magically your programming language gave you enough performance that a single binary + SQLite served all your needs and stuff like caches, message buses, and the like were completely unnecessary that'd radically change your ops budget. Of course that is truly magical, but then again there are quite a lot of papers that demonstrate well-crafted single binary services outperforming heterogenous complex clusters with orders of magnitude more compute resources.

ksec 5y ago

It is probably higher than that given your ORM / ActiveRecord Performance directly impact DB cost. But the point still stands at ~20%. But again, it only works for specific type of Web Apps. Those that require lots of traffic to generate relatively smaller amount of revenue, running on Freemium model wouldn't work because your cost / user are far higher. And these Web Apps / Site power 90% of the internet.