alt Hacker NewsI wonder if you've ever worked on a web service at scale. JSON serialization and deserialization is notoriously expensive.
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It can be, but $500k/year is absurd. It's like they went from the most inefficient system possible to create, to a regular normal system that an average programmer could manage.
I have no idea if they are doing orders of magnitude more processing, but I crunch through 60GB of JSON data in about 3000 files regularly on my local 20-thread machine using nodejs workers to do deep and sometimes complicated queries and data manipulation. It's not exactly lightning fast, but it's free and it crunches through any task in about 3 or 4 minutes or less.
The main cost is downloading the compressed files from S3, but if I really wanted to I could process it all in AWS. It also could go much faster on better hardware. If I have a really big task I want done quickly, I can start up dozens or hundreds of EC2 instances to run the task, and it would take practically no time at all... seconds. Still has to be cheaper than what they were doing.
Would it be better or worse if I had that experience and still said it's stupid?
They got a 1000x speed up just by switching languages.
I highly doubt the issue was serialization latency, unless they were doing something stupid like reserializing the same payload over and over again.