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0 pointsmoe14y ago0 comments

And now the cost of hosting a hundred webapps is just a rounding error in contrast to the cost of developing one.

That's a weird way to look at it, unless you're in the webapp hosting business? For everyone else there is usually only one webapp that they care about.

I can take the same program and handle 20,000+ concurrent users on two servers

Sorry to break it, but that's not how it works. Unless you have one of those rare webapps that never need to touch a database.

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Cushman14y ago

Really? Show of hands, now, who here cares about one (and only one) webapp?

Anyway, what's good for the webapp hosting business is good for web developers, and what's good for web developers is good for the technical ecosystem in general (and then the world). Of course going from VPSes to EC2s was a significant improvement. But that isn't as good as it gets. EC2 rates were cheap already, but when Az started the free tier it represented a significantly lower barrier to entry. That's good for everyone.

And seriously, come on. This is a way of making programs run faster, and not a little faster, but a hundred times faster. It's the very definition of technological progress. It's absurd that we're here arguing about whether it matters or not.

moeOP14y ago

This is a way of making programs run faster, and not a little faster, but a hundred times faster.

Sorry, but if anything then that statement is absurd.

Faster than what? And where's that "hundred times faster" figure coming from?

It seems there's a bit of a misconception about the bottlenecks and cost structure in real world web applications.

Rails (aka the slowest web framework known to man) is popular because it trades hardware for development velocity. Hardware is cheap, developer salaries are not.

Cushman14y ago

It's cheap until it's not. At a certain point, you just can't process more requests at once in Rails. That's your limit. And it's not much— 100, maybe.

But node multiplies that, a lot. Which is nice, because you know it won't break or slow down if a bunch of people use it for some reason. And so you don't have to re-architect your system for a while longer, which is valuable time.

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0 pointsmoe14y ago0 comments

And now the cost of hosting a hundred webapps is just a rounding error in contrast to the cost of developing one.

That's a weird way to look at it, unless you're in the webapp hosting business? For everyone else there is usually only one webapp that they care about.

I can take the same program and handle 20,000+ concurrent users on two servers

Sorry to break it, but that's not how it works. Unless you have one of those rare webapps that never need to touch a database.

0 comments

Cushman14y ago

Really? Show of hands, now, who here cares about one (and only one) webapp?

moeOP14y ago

This is a way of making programs run faster, and not a little faster, but a hundred times faster.

Sorry, but if anything then that statement is absurd.

Faster than what? And where's that "hundred times faster" figure coming from?

It seems there's a bit of a misconception about the bottlenecks and cost structure in real world web applications.

Rails (aka the slowest web framework known to man) is popular because it trades hardware for development velocity. Hardware is cheap, developer salaries are not.

Cushman14y ago

It's cheap until it's not. At a certain point, you just can't process more requests at once in Rails. That's your limit. And it's not much— 100, maybe.

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