>> But since the beginning, our team knew that we should do this in Go because during the discussion phases we saw this could be potentially a very large traffic system
I don't get this reasoning.
I don't get this reasoning.
Based on their description, they should be IO bound. If they're IO bound, their system should spend the vast majority of time in the kernel executing system calls.
If they do that, then whichever language they use has very little relevance to whether or not their system ends up being fast.
EDIT: As an example, my first ever production Ruby app was a messaging middleware server that processed about 3 million messages a day (34/sec) on 10% of a single mid-range 2005-era Xeon core. It was totally unoptimized, and used select() instead of the more modern, faster alternatives. Also, only about 10% of that time was spent in user space. 90% of it was in the kernel, executing system calls, so most meaningful optimization would be in improving the usage of system calls that are exactly the same across languages.
At the time, going beyond a single core required multiple instances, as Ruby lacked native threads back then. But processing 500-600/sec across 2-3 processes on a dual core 2005-era Xeon would not have been challenging even then with that quite naive and dated approach.
As someone else pointed out, they're doing ~4k/sec on a modern dual-core Xeon. Based on the above I'd expect it to be fairly easy to match their ~4K/sec with Ruby today.
Having spent time recently optimizing a setup that does pretty much exactly what they're doing (in Rails; I don't like Rails, but in this case Rails is not a problem), the time saved doing things like eliminating unnecessary buffering all over the place (e.g. POSTs gets buffered by pretty much everything that likes to consider itself a web server, sometimes multiple times; if you e.g. run Nginx in front of pretty much any Ruby web servers running Rails, worst case you may end up with things passed through at least 3, possibly 4 buffers).
Basically they should be IO bound.
I agree that other languages could accomplish the same effect, but I'm not surprised by their sentiment given where they were coming from.
It makes perfect sense to me. What would you have recommended them, for a reasonably-high-performance server implementation? (Please don't say C.)
https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?...
Yes. Other than some very basic scripts, I have never worked with Ruby, so I was not aware that it is so slow. Thanks for pointing that out.
As for my recommendation, it is pretty standard worker architecture:
Their system seems to be an ingesting-only system, that is, the clients are getting an empty HTTP 200 OK response. Given this, I would put openresty (nginx) in the front, with some trivial Lua code[1] to en-queue payloads to beanstalkd. Then, you can either have your workers inside openresty (using Openresty timers) or have them as separate processes and written in the language of choice. We have been using this for a couple of years now and it is working really well for our use case, also an ingesting-only system.
[1] https://github.com/smallfish/lua-resty-beanstalkd/blob/maste...
Than MRI Ruby you mean.
The advantage wouldn't be as much if Ruby designers cared to add AOT compilation in the same vein as Dylan or Common Lisp to the canonical implementation.
> Than MRI Ruby you mean.
Given the nature of orders-of-magnitude comparisons and the lack of Ruby implementations that are even one order of magnitude faster than MRI, "...than Ruby" is reasonably accurate if "...than MRI Ruby" is at all accurate.
> The advantage wouldn't be as much if Ruby designers cared to add AOT compilation in the same vein as Dylan or Common Lisp to the canonical implementation.
Maybe, though that's unproven. AFAIK, actual Ruby implementations with AOT only seem to gain about a factor of 2 improvement, not an order of magnitude.
You could have written this in any number of languages. I don't know why go is more logical than say Java JavaScript.
That may be true for some types of code, but for an app that's predominantly shuffling data over the network you should be spending most of the time in kernel space executing syscalls, and then language differences are largely irrelevant.
> and much easier to write concurrent code in.
How? Writing concurrent code in Ruby is trivial since 1.9.x (prior to 1.9 you had to battle the green threads in MRI for some stuff), which isn't exactly new.