Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a fan of Go and an even bigger fan of Lua, and I'm not sure I agree with your summary. Go and OpenResty can push 300,000 "Hello World" plaintext responses a second, and some Java stuff can do x2 that, so JVM frameworks are strictly better? And something called cpoll_cppsp trumps a sane language choice? Don't be cute. :)

It is perfectly fine to not squeeze every drop from your hardware and pick Go or Lua. In the same vain, Flask may be x20 slower at a meaningless benchmark but you'd note that the ones that involve actual work, you know, the kind your complex app will actually perform, the more involved it is the more the difference shrinks. All the way down to x4, in other words not an order of magnitutde.

The real takeaway summary should probably be: a well made framework like flask doesn't have so much overhead that the productivity gains it offers are not worth trading a bit of performance for.

A terribly made framework (I won't name names) will bite you in the ass. Choose carefully.

I think the idea of a "meaningless benchmark" has become a dogma. Can you possibly know all the complexities that an app will contain when benchmarking a framework? No, but that doesn't make baseline benchmarks useless. Part of the reason for including the most basic (CRUD-ish) operations as separate benchmarks in their tests is so that you can make comparisons between basic "Hello, World" operations and more complex operations, which gives you a bit more insight into the overhead of each framework.

I'll take that any day, over guessing which framework is fastest.

Agreed, I should have avoided that particular phrasing.

Actually, it's other way around. In 'JSON encoding' tornado and flask-pypy are 4x slower than compojure, for example, but in 'Multiple queries' they are 14x slower.

Just for the record, my comment didn't intend to imply that JVM frameworks are strictly better in all cases, and I don't believe that at all. In fact, I'd argue that for the majority of applications, choosing any modern framework purely for benchmark performance is very foolish since all of them perform more than adequately.

Rails, for example, despite always having been "slow," performs far more than adequately for the vast majority of web applications, scaling patterns are well established, and it's obviously hugely productive for many, many developers and companies.

> A terribly made framework (I won't name names) will bite you in the ass. Choose carefully.

Facebook and Twitter seem to be doing alright. Care to elaborate?

Well, it really depends on the application type. We are a Java and Ruby on Rails software house (http://codedose.com), we also have experience working for investment banks, and for some cases Java with Spring or Play is the best way to go, especially if you think about apps with complex back-end.

We have recently released an online market for physical gold trading capable of handling 10k+ concurrent users with horizontally scalable architecture and complex trading engine/accounting logic, and it's all Java. It has to be fast and there is not enough static or almost-static content to make caching effective.

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