Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

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I've run an async Racket web server on Heroku, and it was entirely unexciting.

Which is good.

It handled everything fairly well, for a short-lived (month or two), API server that received several hundred thousand requests a second. (A stand-in server to handle some updating for some hardware in the field. Our normal server failed catastrophically, and took out the entire rack, which included the backup... So we needed something up quick, whilst we rebuilt the backup and redeployed the front-facing servers.)

It was fast to work with, but that's sort of a given with any Lisp, even though we had some ties between web, typed, and lazy Racket.

The documentation wasn't awesome. There's enough to get you started, but at the time, there wasn't a lot more.

But, Racket is fairly predictable in how functions are exposed, and how they should work. (As well as having a REPL to rapidly prototype).

The documentation is my biggest frustration with Racket. Trying to grok how to use something as simple as their HTTP module proved difficult. It's great documentation, but seems to be aimed at a more academic level than pragmatic.

Were you using the built in web server? I've been wondering about its performance in real world loads.

Only partially.

I lifted out the MIME functions and some of the threading functions. Probably the request constructors as well.

It was also on a Heroku scaling dyno.

In my testing, the inbuilt web server is decent, but starts becoming hit and miss around 10,000 - 25,000 requests/sec, depending on hardware.

More than enough for hobby sites, but not quite enough for heavier enterprise applications.

What you do with each request can have huge impacts, a colleague tried to lazily render templates, so follow pre-rendering best practices.

In my testing, the inbuilt web server is decent, but starts becoming hit and miss around 10,000 - 25,000 requests/sec, depending on hardware. More than enough for hobby sites, but not quite enough for heavier enterprise applications.

What are you comparing it to here? Something fast written in java or go? I could understand racket being slower than that, but surely it'd perform faster than the likes of flask or sinatra.

It's about the same as what I get out of most things. Usually, this just ends up being the C10k problem, which you need some not-so-nice code to work around.

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