TortoiseWrath

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not sufficiently evil for my tastes

Oh shit does lemmy not have response caching? Yeah, that’s gonna be an issue pretty soon.

I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day

We do not.

One more anecdote for y’all to pluralize into data: my instance is currently using 915Mi of storage for pictrs and 976Mi for postgres, roughly 650Mi of RAM (including postgres), and negligible CPU

My other reason is that it’s the only way to know I picked an instance that isn’t going to just go away without me and take my account with it. It will be an interesting day when the first major lemmy instance goes down…

Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It’s not so important when it’s the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server’s CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it’s the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you’ll feel it.

Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend to C++ isn’t really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn’t have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.