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Comment by klochner | Hacker News Reader

The most surprising thing for me: python was much more stable then java at the time.

Checking wikipedia, python was released 4 years before java. I always just assumed python was a more recent language.

Here's a hilarious blast from the past: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...

From Lawrence Page himself. Apparently back then you couldn't even set the User-agent header from Java's HTTP libraries.

Timestamp: Jan 7 1996, <strong>4:00 am</strong>

Nice!

Hmm, to me it says 3:00 am. Is there some localization thing going on? I'm looking at it from Finland.

Yep, says 8am to me, from England. So whatever localization they're doing, it's quite badly broken - aren't you supposed to be 2 hrs ahead of me?

And now it says 11:00 am, when it's 23:25 here. Apparently quality of code didn't prevent Google from succeeding.

I'm in California. It says 1 AM to me.

The most surprising thing to me was that the language choice rather than the application architecture is what's blamed (in the excerpt) for only being able to serve 10 reqs/sec.

At the time, it probably was.

I don't see how that is so surprising. At the time, Python was still a rather new interpreted language that was more or less focused on research applications. Nowadays there are tons of improvements, and let's not forget we have CPU cycles to burn.

To put this into context, at the time you would have been going via cgi scripts or maybe trying to embed directly into apache. Mod_python did not exist, asyncore was the only thing you had to do async callouts so that you did not block the thread, etc. There is a reason perl was considered state of the art for serving web pages at this point in history. To give you a bit of an example, YahooMail (nee RocketMail) was basically a bunch of html wrappers around python code to read/manipulate mbox files and you would have been amazed at the amount of hardware it required to keep that performant; google had to be faster and was doing a lot of background work that we never had to deal with.

In the late 90s there was just not the same set of options available in the standard library, people were just learning what was required for horizontal scaling, and I can easily see how the added burden that Python 1.4 would have imposed compared to C or C++ would be a deal-killer when it came time for a re-write.

Python is still more stable than Java, although the gap has closed dramatically over the last decade. It's just that Python is slower (which wasn't the case in 1996).

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