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This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying ever

This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software products. Performance does in fact matter and all other things equal, a fast product is more pleasurable than a slow one. Thankfully some people like the folks at Figma took the risk and proved the point. Even if we're innovating on hard technical problems (which most of us are not), performance still matters.

zelphirkalt 1y ago
Performance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, but also don't obsess with performance to the point of making things unusable or way too complicated for what they do.
- sgarland 1y ago
  > way too complicated for what they do Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.
- anymouse123456 1y ago
  This kind of thinking is exactly the problem. Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have. IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand. Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution. It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down. Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.
  - raekk 1y ago
    > It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down. This.
mr_toad 1y ago
Containers were invented because VMs were too slow to cold start and used too much memory. Their whole raison d'être is performance.
- anonymars 1y ago
  Yeah, I think Electron would be the poster child
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  Can you live fork containers like you can VMs? VM clone time is surprisingly quick once you stop copying memory, after that it's mostly ejecting the NIC and bringing up the new one.
  - mort96 1y ago
    I can't say I've ever cared about live forking a container (or VM, for that matter)
    - hinkley 1y ago
      Your cloud provider may be doing it for you. Ops informed me one day that AWS was pushing out a critical security update to their host OS. So of course I asked if that meant I needed to redeploy our cluster, and they responded no, and in fact they had already pushed it. Our cluster keeps stats on when processes start. So we can alert on crashes, and because new processes (cold JIT) can skew the response numbers, and are inflection points to analyze performance improvements or regressions. There were no restarts that morning. So they pulled the tablecloth out from under us. TIL.
      - mort96 1y ago
        None of this is making live forking a container desirable to me, I'm not a cloud hosting company (and if I was, I'd be happy to provide a VPS as a VM rather than a container)
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Docker good actually
- anymouse123456 1y ago
  nah - we'll look back on Docker the same way many of are glaring at our own sins with OO these days.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    Docker is just making all the same promises we were made in 1991 that never came to fruition. Preemptive multitasking OSes with virtual memory were suppose to solve all of our noisy neighbor problems.
sgarland 1y ago
Agreed, though containers and K8s aren’t themselves to blame (though they make it easier to get worse results). Debian Slim is < 30 MB. Alpine, if you can live with musl, is 5 MB. The problem comes from people not understanding what containers are, and how they’re built; they then unknowingly (or uncaringly) add in dozens of layers without any attempt at reducing or flattening. Similarly, K8s is of course just a container orchestration platform, but since it’s so easy to add to, people do so without knowing what they’re doing, and you wind up with 20 network hops to get out of the cluster.
hinkley 1y ago
If you’re implying that Docker is the slop, instead of an answer to the slop, I haven’t seen it.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

Performance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, but also don't obsess with performance to the point of making things unusable or way too complicated for what they do.

sgarland 1y ago
> way too complicated for what they do Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.
anymouse123456 1y ago
This kind of thinking is exactly the problem. Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have. IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand. Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution. It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down. Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.
- raekk 1y ago
  > It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down. This.

mr_toad 1y ago

Containers were invented because VMs were too slow to cold start and used too much memory. Their whole raison d'être is performance.

anonymars 1y ago
Yeah, I think Electron would be the poster child
bobmcnamara 1y ago
Can you live fork containers like you can VMs? VM clone time is surprisingly quick once you stop copying memory, after that it's mostly ejecting the NIC and bringing up the new one.
- mort96 1y ago
  I can't say I've ever cared about live forking a container (or VM, for that matter)
  - hinkley 1y ago
    Your cloud provider may be doing it for you. Ops informed me one day that AWS was pushing out a critical security update to their host OS. So of course I asked if that meant I needed to redeploy our cluster, and they responded no, and in fact they had already pushed it. Our cluster keeps stats on when processes start. So we can alert on crashes, and because new processes (cold JIT) can skew the response numbers, and are inflection points to analyze performance improvements or regressions. There were no restarts that morning. So they pulled the tablecloth out from under us. TIL.
    - mort96 1y ago
      None of this is making live forking a container desirable to me, I'm not a cloud hosting company (and if I was, I'd be happy to provide a VPS as a VM rather than a container)

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Docker good actually

anymouse123456 1y ago
nah - we'll look back on Docker the same way many of are glaring at our own sins with OO these days.
- hinkley 1y ago
  Docker is just making all the same promises we were made in 1991 that never came to fruition. Preemptive multitasking OSes with virtual memory were suppose to solve all of our noisy neighbor problems.

sgarland 1y ago

Agreed, though containers and K8s aren’t themselves to blame (though they make it easier to get worse results). Debian Slim is < 30 MB. Alpine, if you can live with musl, is 5 MB. The problem comes from people not understanding what containers are, and how they’re built; they then unknowingly (or uncaringly) add in dozens of layers without any attempt at reducing or flattening. Similarly, K8s is of course just a container orchestration platform, but since it’s so easy to add to, people do so without knowing what they’re doing, and you wind up with 20 network hops to get out of the cluster.

hinkley 1y ago

If you’re implying that Docker is the slop, instead of an answer to the slop, I haven’t seen it.