Hacker News Reader

We run a separate virtual machine for each request, so there’s no need for garbage collection

I'm curious to see the impact of this strategy on performance.

I wondered about this sentence. If you would apply scripting functionality to serve long-running websocket or HTTP/2 connections I'm sure garbage collection would be necessary. However if the scripts are really per request and not per connection then it could work - but the capabilites would be much more limited then what you can do in other scripted-webserver-environments (e.g. node).

A VM context could be cheap to create and include an amount of memory above what that script uses for its lifetime. Meaning a single allocation and then the whole thing gets free'd at the end of execution. Analogous to how CGIs execute.

Slightly off-topic, but I wouldn't worry. Nowadays hypervisors can boot up complete OSes in ~800ms.

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/05/18/lxd-crushes-kvm-in-de...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com