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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of benchmarks are not very meaningful. I think that pretty much any modern framework/language can handle at least 1 million idle WebSockets. It's much more interesting to measure performance when you start sending messages through them at regular intervals.

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When people rewrite system from X where X in (Python, Ruby, Node, Clojure) to Go they usually see at least 10x improvement.

This is just one recent example: https://www.infoq.com/articles/api-gateway-clojure-golang

The money quote:

"The end result enabled us to reduce 25 instances (c4 xlarge) running Clojure code - able to process 60 concurrent requests, to two instances (c3.2xlarge) running Go code able to support ~5000 concurrent requests a minute"

If you google around you'll find more stories like that.

To do better than Go you would have to drop to C++ or Rust.

That doesn't make any sense though.

"When people rewrite system from X where X in (Python, Ruby, Node, Clojure) to Go they usually see at least 10x improvement."

Sure but how much of the performance gains come from Go and how much come from just having a better understanding of the problem the second time around?

Go is strongly typed and compiled, it literally does 10x less work than dynamic languages for most things.

Pypy leads to a near 10x speed up over cPython as well.

Or Java or C# or basically any non-interpreted language.

In this case, Clojure is already running on the JVM

The Clojure compiler does not generally produce the same byte code as the Java one.

Idiomatic clojure is routinely slower than idiomatic Java and that’s a well known and expected outcome.

That article is anything but useful. They have spent significantly more time designing and writing app in Go than their prototype in Clojure and now it’s faster? What a surprise!

> To do better than Go you would have to drop to C++ or Rust.

C++ and Rust yes, but also Java and .NET.

In my experience Java, C#, and Go are roughly on par. Go is a bit easier to optimize though.

I didn't think Go rewrites were common anymore since the results were mediocre.

Hmm, there's a slight disparity between the quote and their benchmark table, which shows Clojure and Go neck and neck in the request/sec dept. I guess all the system re-architecting explains most of the difference.

In any case, as the article text also mentions, on the Go side they are using a complete reverse-proxy library that's included with the Go stdlib, which can be a significant advantage aside from the properties of the language itself.

But then it seems they ended up reimplementing many things that the JVM provides: "In order to achieve out of the box functionality such as CPU and memory usage metrics, business logic counters and more - we needed to write basically this entire stack from scratch, which enabled us a much more rapid deep dive of the intricacies of Golang."

They are not idling. Look at the code.

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