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0 pointsmoe14y ago0 comments

This is a way of making programs run faster, and not a little faster, but a hundred times faster.

Sorry, but if anything then that statement is absurd.

Faster than what? And where's that "hundred times faster" figure coming from?

It seems there's a bit of a misconception about the bottlenecks and cost structure in real world web applications.

Rails (aka the slowest web framework known to man) is popular because it trades hardware for development velocity. Hardware is cheap, developer salaries are not.

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Cushman14y ago· 1 in thread

It's cheap until it's not. At a certain point, you just can't process more requests at once in Rails. That's your limit. And it's not much— 100, maybe.

But node multiplies that, a lot. Which is nice, because you know it won't break or slow down if a bunch of people use it for some reason. And so you don't have to re-architect your system for a while longer, which is valuable time.

moeOP14y ago

But node multiplies that, a lot.

Yes. Rails is measured in hundreds per second. Node in thousands per second.

The point that you still seem to be missing is that the monetary amounts involved have normally turned into a rounding error long before you reach a traffic-volume where this difference becomes relevant.

Or, in other words, hosting a "webapp" already is nearly free in terms of hardware.

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