4 ms·

I am curious how much a Go lang rewrite would make a difference in scaling up.

by diminish 13y ago

noelwelsh 13y ago
I laughed. Deft trolling. Bravo.
- solistice 13y ago
  He forgot building the 2012 Servers outlined in Jeff Atwoods blog post "Building Servers for Fun and Prof... OK, Maybe Just for Fun". Gotta do that for bleeding (profusely) edge power.
- booop 13y ago
  Why? Looks like a legitimate question to me.
  - weego 13y ago
    Perhaps so, but then it would fit into the category of 'unaware of being a parody of itself' statements/questions that are also (unintentionally) humorous such as the classic "I can tell that site was built in rails from the design".
  - noelwelsh 13y ago
    Some time ago the HN hivemind went through a period of blind Node.js love. Now it's going through blind Go love. Regardless of what you think of either language, "rewrite in X" is not a magic incantation that will spontaneously solve all your architectural issues. Designing a good architecture involves balancing many components, of which your primary implementation language is an important, but not exclusive, element. There are also the organisational issues -- hiring, spending time not adding new features, etc.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
jlouis 13y ago
It depends how much time is spent doing computation and how much time is spent doing lookups from disk. If the latter is clearly dominating, then a switch to Go will not help much.
- billybob255 13y ago
  I read a comment from one of the sysadmins (alienth?) saying their main bottlenecks were I/O.
  - espeed 13y ago
    With all of Reddit's past problems with AWS and EBS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339214, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469838, ), I figured they would haved jumped to Google Compute Engine by now, which has much better IO all around (http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...).
- diminish 13y ago
  thanks for the insight. i did not have much to do with Go. But hear a lot of positive benchmarks here on HN. Reddit is kind of like an example social web app, and I read a lot on its architectural changes and scaling efforts. So for social Web 2.0 apps, which are getting older now, I m curious how much Go would make a difference. Mainly for Google applications, apparently Go brings a lot of speed and performance on the same server.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    It doesn't really matter what the genre of an application is. What matters is the runtime fundamentals. How much time is spent computing vs waiting for I/O? Whichever one is slower is the current bottleneck and is what you should fret about. Go becomes something to consider if the bottleneck is computation time. It's tangential otherwise.

I am curious how much a Go lang rewrite would make a difference in scaling up.

noelwelsh 13y ago

I laughed. Deft trolling. Bravo.

solistice 13y ago
He forgot building the 2012 Servers outlined in Jeff Atwoods blog post "Building Servers for Fun and Prof... OK, Maybe Just for Fun". Gotta do that for bleeding (profusely) edge power.
booop 13y ago
Why? Looks like a legitimate question to me.
- weego 13y ago
  Perhaps so, but then it would fit into the category of 'unaware of being a parody of itself' statements/questions that are also (unintentionally) humorous such as the classic "I can tell that site was built in rails from the design".
- noelwelsh 13y ago
  Some time ago the HN hivemind went through a period of blind Node.js love. Now it's going through blind Go love. Regardless of what you think of either language, "rewrite in X" is not a magic incantation that will spontaneously solve all your architectural issues. Designing a good architecture involves balancing many components, of which your primary implementation language is an important, but not exclusive, element. There are also the organisational issues -- hiring, spending time not adding new features, etc.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

jlouis 13y ago

It depends how much time is spent doing computation and how much time is spent doing lookups from disk. If the latter is clearly dominating, then a switch to Go will not help much.

billybob255 13y ago
I read a comment from one of the sysadmins (alienth?) saying their main bottlenecks were I/O.
- espeed 13y ago
  With all of Reddit's past problems with AWS and EBS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339214, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2469838, ), I figured they would haved jumped to Google Compute Engine by now, which has much better IO all around (http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...).
diminish 13y ago
thanks for the insight. i did not have much to do with Go. But hear a lot of positive benchmarks here on HN. Reddit is kind of like an example social web app, and I read a lot on its architectural changes and scaling efforts. So for social Web 2.0 apps, which are getting older now, I m curious how much Go would make a difference. Mainly for Google applications, apparently Go brings a lot of speed and performance on the same server.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  It doesn't really matter what the genre of an application is. What matters is the runtime fundamentals. How much time is spent computing vs waiting for I/O? Whichever one is slower is the current bottleneck and is what you should fret about. Go becomes something to consider if the bottleneck is computation time. It's tangential otherwise.