[marknadal]

Great article, actually. Typical HN comments on performance optimizations are complaints like "this isn't a real world use case" or things like that. Most of which, they miss that comparing baseline performance metrics against two systems is still genuinely interesting in and of by itself, and acts as a huge learning catalyst to understanding what is going on. I think this article did a great job of making an honest comparison and discussing what is going on, so props to the team! (We did something similar as well, where we compared cached read performance against Redis, and were 50X faster - here: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2... ).

[banachtarski]

The problem is what "baseline" means. For example, a multithreaded program will always run slower than a single threaded one on one thread by definition. It has to do work in order to coordinate the threads. Obviously, this doesn't mean we avoid multithreaded code.

In this case, the software being tested was explicitly written to manage the coordination of data on many nodes, so why is the definition of "baseline" a single laptop? Seems specious.

[marknadal]

Yes, but that is exactly why I think these types of articles and discussions are useful - people who understand what is going on often times assume that so do others, but for many people it all looks like magic.

How many people out there (genuine question here) assume the opposite of what you know / that they are ignorant of it? How many people do you think that when they hear "multithreaded" that they associate that with being faster?

Now assume the people who know there is overhead work to split up and divide the work across threads... because they have this knowledge, also "see everything as a nail because they have a hammer"? That sometimes the right solution is to simply run a single threaded operation, not parallelize everything?

I think there are interesting merits to all of that, even if it means "hyperbolic" articles or cliche not-realistic world tests. They challenge our thinking, our assumptions, our approach. And then separately, there should be articles/discussions on real-world tests and use cases.

[user5994461]

You guys should realize that this is a commercial company promoting its own product. They're just doing the test that makes them look good.