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Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Buttons@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.

1500 users just doesn't seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.

Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?

Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it's overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?

Or maybe the code is just inefficient?

Which brings me to the title's question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.

If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn't matter in this case.

If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I'm sure this has happened before, but I don't know anything about the Lemmy code.

Or, again, maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?

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[–] Espi@kbin.social 46 points 2 years ago (8 children)

I would say that it's extremely unlikely.

Websites in general are never limited by raw code execution, they are mostly limited by IO. Be that disk IO as files are read and written, database IO as you need to execute complex queries to gather all the data to build the user timeline, and network IO to transfer data to and from the user. For decentralized social media like Kbin or Lemmy its even more IO limited as each instance needs to go back and forth to other instances to keep up-to-date data.

Websites usually benefit much more from caching and in-memory databases to keep frequently used data in fast storage.

This is why simple, high level, object oriented, garbage collected languages have become so common. All the CPU performance penalties they incur don't actually affect the website performance.

[–] balder1993@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That’s correct. I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day.

Not saying there isn’t a difference in language performance, but for most world problems the architecture and algorithms matter more than the language for performance. Unless you’re in a very constrained environment such as lower end smartphones or embedded systems.

[–] tortoise@tortoisewrath.com 4 points 2 years ago

I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day

We do not.

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