Who Cares About Performance July 13, 2007
Justin James
asks
why nobody seems to care about performance anymore. He talks about how the
performance hit you get from using a “slow” language directly translate into
increased hardware and electricity costs just to maintain the same kind of
performance you would have had if you’d used a “fast” language or spent more
time optimizing your code. All his points are good, but they’re also all
irrelevant. You see, for most applications the performance hits you get from
slow languages or non-optimized code just don’t matter. Your system will still
be responsive enough that no-one will be bothered. People don’t care because it
just doesn’t have any noticeable effect
on the end product and
some languages
make coding far more enjoyable and productive. Their productivity gains far
outweigh performance hits that are almost unnoticeable by end users. This is
exactly why Ruby on Rails is kicking ass and taking names. It’s not terribly
performant. Ruby is unquestionably a slow
language. The huge infrastructure of RoR makes it even slower… but it makes
developers incredibly productive and the resulting sites are “fast enough”,
especially if you take the time to host them with the correct tools.
Before I started working at Akamai I was one of those people who just didn’t
care about performance and you would have been hard pressed to convince me that
coding for performance really mattered for anyone who wasn’t coding something
like a router or OS Kernel. That was until I started being presented with
numbers that just blew my mind. Our group is currently just looking at a
very small subset of the data that flows
through Akamai’s pipes and we still have to process
hundreds of millions of log lines per
hour. I remember amazed by
a
graph showing Yaws handling 80,000 concurrent connections per second while
Apache keeled over at 4,000. “80,000!” I thought. “With performance like that we
could blow through those logs. Now lets see… Hundreds of millions divided by
80,000 is…. oh… not… even… close.” I still think that
Erlang could be an
incredible tool for some of the tasks here but even a language with incredible
concurrency support like Erlang isn’t, alone, enough to deal with the sheer
scale of things here. You have to care
about performance at Akamai. It’s not just what we sell to our customers, it’s
the only way for us to survive what we
sell to our customers.
I still believe that for most developers language and framework choices are more
important that worrying about performance, but now I understand what a sheltered
view of the world I had and how that view fits into the larger world. Joining
Akamai combined with a recent series of small performance related events has
opened my eyes to just what a dramatic choice it can make when you do start
taking performance into account. Yes things are generally “fast enough” but you
will kick your competitors asses when their products are “fast enough” but yours
is instantaneous. “Lightning fast” is a more compelling feature than you would
ever guess. It’s pointless marketspeak in a feature list but once you experience
it it’s damn hard to walk away.
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