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Comment by Eikon | Hacker News Reader

This argument is so tiring. That's part of why websites are so slow despite having insane hardware at their disposal.

At my company, for a web app we run in production, we strive to get every response out of our infrastructure in under a millisecond, everything above that except for a few select endpoints is considered as a bug. By using sensible technology choices, it's not even that hard to do. A RDMS like postgres can answer to queries in microseconds.

Nice bonus, we can provide real time computation features our competitors could only dream of, just by not using dog-slow technology.

Our customers are not techies and you know what? When they use our product, the first comment is usually "wow, it's so fast".

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Are you guys hiring? xD

Just to expand on your point:

Sure you can let a chunk of code take a few seconds longer than it could with little overall effect.

But stack a hundred of these up and all those seconds compound and suddenly become immensely important.

A suit of armour with a million chinks isn't very effective armour.

(As an aside, depending on your use case, it can be worth optimizing the big bottlenecks, high use, computationally expensive, etc. components and not worry too much about the rest)

> A suit of armour with a million chinks isn't very effective armour.

Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_mail

Right, I agree. My question is “what application is constrained by interpreter overhead.” It should be faster than milliseconds for almost any code, I would think.

I am agreeing with you, I don’t understand your response.

He is pointing out that it isn't necessarily a constraint, just an improvement of the product by using more performant systems.

Most websites today are slow due to loading megabytes of javascript, trackers from a dozen domains, css frameworks, and large images.

same at my startup. I made the descision to use elixir because its so fast while still having the readability of ruby or python. end result saves us money on hardware. more importantly, the customers feel like they are using a responsive and fast application.

What web/app stack are you using to fulfill <1ms responses?

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