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Is the pain worth the gain? Writing webapps in C (Benchmarks vs Flask and Nodejs)

Bence Kotis on October 29, 2020

I wanted to do a performance comparison between Facil(a web framework for C) against some more conventional tools, such as Flask(Gunicorn server) a...
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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Except that:

  • we have no idea whether those benchmarks would be representative of our actual bottlenecks - if anything, i would assume they aren't
  • security issues that comes with writing in C probably overcome any benefit
  • the cost of hosting is almost always trivial compared to the salary of good developers, so you are probably optimizing the wrong thing if switching to a lower level makes your team 2% or more less productive & happy

For example hosting Ruby is definitely more expensive than most other languages, it still does not matter at all in the grand scheme of things

==> m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-...

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Bence Kotis

Of course, I never intended this to be a be all end all benchmark(as I said in the final notes, it is rather simplistic), I just figured these results might be of some interest to other people.
Those are interesting points, especially about the costs of hosting with Ruby. Thanks for reading!

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Fair enough.
I think benchmarks should be used by library and framework authors to improve their software.
As app developers, we should mostly care only about how good the API & documentation & community is.

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PaweΕ‚ Kowalski

There are also hobby projects where all those things dont matter much ;)

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

How do you manage to have heavy loads for your hobby projects, impressive πŸ˜›?

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PaweΕ‚ Kowalski

Hobby projects dont have heavy loads, i would say ;) They are just about having fun.

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Valts LiepiΕ†Ε‘ • Edited

This is an intersting benchmark, although why did you limit the compiled solutions to only C?

I'd be very curious to see higher level compiled languages in these charts, like Rust and Haskell. They would give you the performance of C, but language features of languages such ash Python, thus reducing the pain associated with C programs.

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Bence Kotis

That's a great idea for a next post - thanks for reading! :)

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Shaun Smiley

Agreed. I'd be particularly interested in facil vs rust, as they are more comparable (i.e. produce gc free, optimized binaries).

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Ben Halpern

I love these graphics.

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Bence Kotis

Thanks! The individual frames were made using matplotlib, then I generated the gifs using gifski(gif.ski/)

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Juan Carlos

Very interesting post!. πŸ˜ƒ

Nim lang is missing here, write as easy as Python, run fast as C.

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Bence Kotis

Thanks for reading! :D Haven't used Nim lang before, but looking at some benchmarks it looks like a neat language

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Rolf Streefkerk

This comparison would be interesting to run again against; Netty and FastHTTP, these are known to be among the top performers.

github.com/valyala/fasthttp
netty.io

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Bence Kotis

Great suggestion, I'll have to make some more in-depth benchmarks and give these frameworks a go. Thanks for reading!

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opensas

Great article, it might be interesting to add other options that claim to be as performant as C but more friendlier and closer to dynamic languages (like javascript and python)
In that sense, I think a comparison with Crystal language would be great.

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Bence Kotis

Great suggestion, thanks!

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Raymond

I've also heard a similar story from discord where they switched from Go to Rust for a specific service
blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-sw...
garbage collection seems to be a problem for high load applications as it causes spikes

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Bence Kotis

Thats an interesting article, thanks!

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Zizaco

You should add Rust to the comparison

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Bence Kotis

I'll have to do a more detailed benchmark with all the new languages suggested - thanks for reading!

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Rommel Paras

I'd love to see some comparison with Go as a web server. I've been pondering how it would operate vs Python FastApi

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Bence Kotis

Thanks for the suggestion!

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Viet Vu

Worth it? Yes. But not on a bigger perspective. A C/C++ developer is expensive.

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lakhara

Hey Bence, very interesting article! I was wondering what tools have you used for benchmarking. Can you help me with that ?

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Bence Kotis

Hey Lakhara, thanks for reading! I used ApacheBench to create the load and measure the latency, and used top in batch mode to measure the CPU and RAM%.

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Abdisalan

Now the question is... What do you consider pain?

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Jonathan Boudreau

I think for your benchmark to get a bit closer to a real world example, it would need a database call at the very least. When it comes to webapps, this is usually the bottleneck - not the application.

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Bence Kotis

Great suggestion, thanks!