I appreciate the kind words. :) Of course profiling is important. Even with starting on a greenfield project of this scale, I don't think I'd choose Go (which

I appreciate the kind words. :) Of course profiling is important. Even with starting on a greenfield project of this scale, I don't think I'd choose Go (which I spend a lot of time writing). The ecosystems aren't as mature in libraries and whatnot as Python is. But aside from that, we do profile, and we know that we have some bottlenecks with actual query time. Not to say that this is the sole contributor, but it plays a role. And you're right about us being in a position to be able to leverage Varnish to it's fullest. We have a large number of reads vs writes, and a large percentage of those are anonymous users. Even if we had a faster backend, I don't see why we'd avoid something as simple and useful as Varnish. Even caching things for 1 second is invaluable when doing 45k/s. Even if our backend was some super optimized C code, it's pointless. Varnish also provides us some other benefits, like being able to serve a "stale" version if we're down and smooth over hiccups.