3 ms·
More precisely, when deploying the new service microservice it used less than half as much CPU to process more requests per second. This is not “Java slow, Pyt
by acdha 1y ago
More precisely, when deploying the new service microservice it used less than half as much CPU to process more requests per second.
This is not “Java slow, Python fast” – I expected it to be the reverse – but rather that the developers who cranked out a messy Spring app somehow managed to cancel out all of the work the JVM developers have done without doing anything obviously wrong. There wasn’t a single bottleneck, just death by a thousand cuts with data access patterns, indirection, very deep stack traces, etc.
I have no doubt that there are people here who could’ve rewritten it in better Java for significant wins but the goal with the rewrite was to align a project originally written by a departed team with a larger suite of Python code for the rest of the app, and to deal with various correctness issues. Using Pydantic for the data models not only reduced the amount of code significantly, it flushed out a bunch of inconsistency in the input validation and that’s what I’d been looking for along with reusing our common code libraries for consistency. The performance win was just gravy and, to be clear, I don’t think that’s saying anything about the JVM other than that it does not yet have an optimization to call an LLM to make code less enterprise-y.
- throwaway2037 1y agoOkay, I understand your point. Basically, you rewrote an awful (clickbat-worthy) enterprisey Java web app into a reasonable, maintainable Python web app. I am sympathetic. Yes, I agree: I have seen, sadly, far more trashy Java enterprisey apps than not. Why? I don't know. The incentives are not well-aligned. As a counterpoint: Look at Crazy Bob's (Lee/R.I.P.) Google Guice or Norman Maurer's Netty.IO or Tim Fox's Vert.x: All of them are examples of how to write ultra-lean, low-level, high-performance modern Java apps... but are frequently overlooked to hire cheap, low-skill Java devs to write "yet another Spring app".
- acdha 1y ago> but are frequently overlooked to hire cheap, low-skill Java devs to write "yet another Spring app". Yeah, that’s why I labeled it culture since it was totally a business failure with contracting companies basically doing the “why hire these expensive people when we get paid the same either way?” No point at ranting about the language, it can’t fix the business but unfortunately there’s a ton of inertia around that kind of development and a lot of people have been trained that way. I imagine this must be very frustrating for the Java team at Oracle knowing that their hard work is going to be buried by half of the users.
- p2detar 1y agoIMO the “Spring fever” is the most horrible thing that has happened to Java. There genuinely are developers and companies that reduce the whole language and its ecosystem to Spring. This is just sad. I’m glad that I have been working 15+ years with Java and never touched any Spring stuff whatsoever.