[dec0dedab0de]

That “traditional” site doesn’t actually load the data from disk, in practice. It does once, after a reboot, but that’s true for this solution’s executable file as well.

Does Apache/Nginx/IIS load static files in memory ahead of time? I would assume no, unless someone went through and did some optimizations. Even so, there is always a point where memory runs out, and in that case a templating engine is essentially compression. I would assume if the author outputted his whole website as static files and stored them in memory it would be even faster, but that would require quite a bit more memory.

[marcosdumay]

> Does Apache/Nginx/IIS load static files in memory ahead of time?

Linux loads them on the first usage. If you have enough memory, they'll just stay there. It doesn't that much memory, most sites are pretty small.

But the article's way doe use less memory, less system calls, and is completely optimized for that one site only. So yeah, it will surely be faster. Besides, his site appears to not be static.

[hinkley]

> Linux loads them on the first usage.

Yes, but.

The problem with OS file caches has ever been that people look at a box, see that the programs aren't consuming all of the available memory, and argue that they should be able to cram more shit on the box because it's 'underutilized'.

There are very reasonable and sane system architectures that let the OS handle caching, but you need a way to defend against these sorts of situations.

The performance falloff for this failure mode is exponential, so people try it a few times, and not getting any negative feedback, they add it to their toolbox only to get lectured months later once the bad behavior has not only become standard for them but also spread to other people.

It almost begs for a different system call that can earmark the memory usage by the app in a way that's easier for people to see.

[citrin_ru]

With Apache/Nginx e.t.c. a file is cached by VM/FS on the first request and will stay in RAM for a long time unless there is a memory pressure. For most sites this is good enough. For cases where it isn't one can pre-load files after a reboot using find /path -type f -exec cat {} + > /dev/null.

[xena]

Author here. I don't identify as male. It would be nice if you could update your comment to not make a factual error when referring to me. Please use https://pronoun.is/they.

Thanks!

[0x457]

They don't, but OS can pre-fetch files ahead of time. Zfs will load "hot" files as soon as it can.

You can also easily preload things into memory in boot yourself, so static websites usually don't serve files from disk.