In my opinion it isn’t so much of a lost art or lamentable accretion of useless abstractions, but an increase in the scope of what web apps do these days. Most of us aren’t working on static sites or simple CMS publishing- those are a solved problem. Instead we’re building mobile banks, diagnostic systems, software tooling, 3D games, and shopping malls. The complexity is inherent in the maturity of the web and it’s many uses, as well as its global scale. Hugs of death are rare these days thanks to better architecture and infrastructure, even though the scale of users has grown 100X.

Yes there are wildly unnecessary abstractions that are used for small sites/apps, but I would contend they are artifacts of someone who it’s trying to learn something new, and/or get promoted. I have no problem with the former.

> ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impressive.

I honestly don't understand how that can be true. I'm not suggesting you're lying of course, but when you put it this way it's almost like people are actively trying to slow their programs down. I have a few ideas on why that might be the case (switch to slow interpreted languages, switch to bigger web frameworks, bigger payload) but even that wouldn't explain all of it. Do you have any idea why things are this way?

I would guess this is close to a default Apache + mod_wsgi setup, and this is one of the easiest way of hosting Python web apps, so basically achievable by anyone on HN.

I assume (based on 180 req/s for static page) that he is using mpm_prefork, where each Apache child handles a single connection. If he switched to mpm_event, which uses event loop like nginx, ~10k rps should easily be achievable, but I don't think WSGI would work with that.

I generally agree with your comment. But the point here is not this is cutting edge performance or anything, but rather that people on HN know how to set up this type of website.

If you have any tips on how to get ~10k rps (or even a more reasonable improvement) on a £4 a month server, I at least would be very interested in hearing about them.

The author provides no information other than to say it's an Apache + Django setup. That's pretty bare-bones and is part of most tutorials online.