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by ic_fly2 310 days ago
It’s a good article on speed.

But honestly the thing that makes any of my programs slow is network calls. And there a nice async setup goes a long way. And then k8 for the scaling.

3 comments

This. I maintain an ecommerce platform written in Python. Even with Python being slow, less than 30% of our request time is spent executing code, the rest is talking to stuff over the network.
I think articles like this cast too wide a net when they say "performance" or "<language> is fast/slow".

A bunch of SREs discussing which languages/servers/runtimes are fast/slow/efficient in comparable production setups would give more practical guidance.

If you're building an http daemon in a traditional three-tiered app (like a large % of people on HN), IME, Python has quietly become a great language in that space, compared to its peers, over the last 8 years.

SRE here, that horizontal scaling with Python has impacts as it’s more connections to database and so forth so you are impacting things even if you don’t see it.
Meh, even with basic async I’ve been able to overload azure’s premium ampq offering memory capacity.

But yes managing db connections is a pain. But I don’t think it’s any better in Java (my only other reference at this scale)

That’s why we use Firestore