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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Programming
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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.
It is fairly relevant to lemmy as is. Quite a few instances have ram constraints and are hitting swap. Consider how much worse it would be in python.
Currently most of the issues are architectural and can be fixed with tweaking how certain things are done (i.e., image hosting on an object store instead of locally).