How can some really large services (like Dropbox) afford to use Python as a primary language, if it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower than other, compiled languages?
9th December 2012
My answer to How can some really large services (like Dropbox) afford to use Python as a primary language, if it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower than other, compiled languages? on Quora
Because raw language speed often doesn’t matter that much. In the case if Dropbox the client software spends most of its time waiting for bits to load from the network or from disk. Most large websites spend their time waiting for the database. You can’t speed up network or disk performance by using a faster language.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR - 16th March 2024
- The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken - 8th March 2024
- Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing - 5th March 2024
- Interesting ideas in Observable Framework - 3rd March 2024
- Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR - 27th February 2024
- The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video - 21st February 2024
- Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins - 9th February 2024
- Datasette 1.0a8: JavaScript plugins, new plugin hooks and plugin configuration in datasette.yaml - 7th February 2024
- LLM 0.13: The annotated release notes - 26th January 2024
- Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat - 21st January 2024