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by acdha 1344 days ago
You’re not wrong but I do think it’s important to remember the context: people don’t tend to write math-heavy code in classic JS (there’s a side discussion about WASM now) so relatively few apps bottleneck on CPU - it’s wild when you see people going on about how they need to switch frameworks based on some microbenchmark of request decoding when 99% of their request processing time is some kind of database. I’ve seen more Node apps blow up on RAM usage than CPU because someone thought async would magically make their app faster without asking how much temporary state they were using.

Where I think there’s more of a problem is cultural: similarly to Java, there’s a subset of programmers seemingly dedicated to layering abstractions faster than the JIT developers can optimize them.
2 comments
jesse__ 1344 days ago
>> Where I think there’s more of a problem is cultural: [...] there’s a subset of programmers seemingly dedicated to layering abstractions faster than the JIT developers can optimize them.

This sounds extremely accurate to me

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liuliu 1344 days ago
"Relatively few apps bottleneck on CPU" is a very 2010 opinion. With fast intranet (100Gbps+) and SSD, running business logic can become the bottleneck in many cases.

Unfortunately, I don't have readily available data to back up my claim neither.

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acdha 1344 days ago
I’m not saying it can’t happen, just that it’s pretty rare. SSDs are not infinite capacity and 100G networking isn’t common even in data centers - and more to the point, what really matters is latency: how many cycles can your CPU exercise in the time it takes for a round-trip network request is usually orders of magnitude greater than your business logic.

Again, not saying it never happens but I’ve rarely seen the kind of microbenchmark this story is about end up correlating with real application performance. I have seen developers get all fired up in some religious war and endanger their entire project trying to see benefits which never materialized, though, a common feature there was this focus on toy benchmarks rather than measuring the whole system or what they could do at the app level if they weren’t supporting some niche framework.

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