Comment by encoderer
1 day ago
I wonder if you've ever worked on a web service at scale. JSON serialization and deserialization is notoriously expensive.
1 day ago
I wonder if you've ever worked on a web service at scale. JSON serialization and deserialization is notoriously expensive.
They got a 1000x speed up just by switching languages.
I highly doubt the issue was serialization latency, unless they were doing something stupid like reserializing the same payload over and over again.
Well, for starters, they replace the RPC call with an in-process function call. But my point is anybody who's surprised that working with JSON at scale is expensive (because hey it's just JSON!) shouldn't be surprised.
Well everything is expensive at scale, and any deserialization/serialization step is going to be expensive if you do it enough. However yes i would be surprised. JSON parsing is pretty optimized now, i suspect most "json parsing at scale is expensive" is really the fault of other parts of the stack
It can be, but $500k/year is absurd. It's like they went from the most inefficient system possible to create, to a regular normal system that an average programmer could manage.
I have no idea if they are doing orders of magnitude more processing, but I crunch through 60GB of JSON data in about 3000 files regularly on my local 20-thread machine using nodejs workers to do deep and sometimes complicated queries and data manipulation. It's not exactly lightning fast, but it's free and it crunches through any task in about 3 or 4 minutes or less.
The main cost is downloading the compressed files from S3, but if I really wanted to I could process it all in AWS. It also could go much faster on better hardware. If I have a really big task I want done quickly, I can start up dozens or hundreds of EC2 instances to run the task, and it would take practically no time at all... seconds. Still has to be cheaper than what they were doing.
Would it be better or worse if I had that experience and still said it's stupid?
You didn't say it was stupid. If you had, I would have just ignored the comment. But you expressed a level of surprised that led me to believe you're unfamiliar with how much of a pain in the ass JSON parsing is.
I think OP’s point was surprise that a company would spend so much on such inefficient json parsing. I’m agreeing. I get that JSON is not the fastest format to parse, but the overarching point is that you would expect changes to be made well before you’re spending $300k on it. Or in a slightly more ideal world, you wouldn't architect something so inefficient in the first place.
But it's common for engineers to blow insane amounts of money unnecessarily on inefficient solutions for "reasons". Sort of reminds me of saas's offering 100 concurrent "serverless" WS connections for like $50 / month - some devs buy into this nonsense.