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Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Jan-2025 06:20:30 JST Glyph

This post about I/O bound "ruby" apps applies equally well to Python, PHP, JS, or any other high-level backend language. We use tools with poor CPU performance and then self-soothe with fairy tales like "most apps are I/O bound" or "only a few critical loops are hot, just measure those" and there is *some* truth to those tropes, but it's important not to let them become thought-terminating clichés about performance. Anyway, it's important reading: https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/01/23/the-mythical-io-bound-rails-app.html
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  The Mythical IO-Bound Rails App
  
  When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency to make your service scale. But how true is this in general?
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  Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 24-Jan-2025 06:20:30 JST Glyph
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  I should probably also highlight this now-classic post that addresses this at the higher level of how to think about performance generally rather than the deconstruction of one specific trope: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/
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    Reflections on software performance
    
    from Nelson Elhage
    
    At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on my other blog, Accidentally Quadratic. In this post, I want to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned while writing performant software, and working with rather a lot more not-so-performant software.

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