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Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

This, and the AgeOfAscent piece it links to, both read like PR pieces commissioned by Microsoft. Both are absent of actual information to really determine what exactly they were testing, or what this means to anyone else's problem space.

Because, of course, when you get to the fun of benchmarks there's always a faster options. With .NET Core offering them 20,000 requests per second (on a C3.large), that is a terribly low bar to hit. Again, maybe they're doing something amazing, but many frameworks have rates in the seven digits on that sort of hardware. And I know .NET Core can process basic requests in the six digits, so even it is hardly the limiting point, and it comes to the logic.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#

Still terribly flawed, but better than someone rewriting an app and then gloating about speed improvements.

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With respect to the TechEmpower benchmarks, if you look at Round 13 [1] they note that ASP.NET got 859 times faster in their benchmarks since Microsoft dedicated effort to improving it.

[1] https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework-benchm...

Indeed (though it's worth noting that they're talking about the performance of ASP.NET Core versus Mono, which was notoriously disastrous performance wise, and that story got somewhat misrepresented). In no way am I saying that the .NET Core is slow.

But if we want to use that benchmark, doing the most trivial useful thing of all -- serializing a simple object to JSON -- and node.js beat core .net. In the recent iteration it beat it by almost 2x (which makes the "node.js is slow we all know that" bit in the linked piece humorous given that it beats aspnetcore in every test but plaintext, which is an irrelevant test anyways given that they put their service behind nginx).

I don't use node.js. I don't advocate it. I personally think most node.js solutions end up being a spaghetti mess. But these sorts of "the details are hidden but look at the magic we wrought!" benchmarks are worse than useless. They're fools gold for people choosing platforms and thinking this sort of advocacy is guidance to learn from.

It's an MS 'Customer Story' so it is a press release.

Duh, yes, of course the logic makes it much slower than copying a L1 cached static response to the client. But then that is not a use case anyone cares very much about.

The AgeOfAscent story is not a PR piece, the writer (Ben Adams) is a very active contributor to the Kestrel server behind .NET Core. If he's writing about improved performance it's probably because he wrote >1/3rd of the patches.

Duh, yes, of course

What a weirdly trite response given that you're essentially repeating what I said. And without specifics the linked piece, and its claims about benchmarks, is utterly meaningless.

"Rewrote inefficient code. Now it's faster. Story at 11!"

The AgeOfAscent story is not a PR piece

Humorously it was likely a "copy a L1 cached static response" type benchmark.

Okay, so it wasn't PR, it was self-aggrandizement (which is effectively PR). Got it. Though in this article it was linked as a performance improvement of "switching" to .NET Core, when really it was a story of terribly inefficient .NET Core code becoming better, though again in a nutshell it is meaningless. Cool.

yea that is caveat for comparing numbers in a simple http payload benchmark -- doesn't really reflect real workloads. I don't think it's meaningless that .NET got better. Perhaps more competition is better, otherwise we'd all be using Java/netty. However, I also see the repetitive work in having different stacks.

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