Ask HN: Are dynamic languages fast enough for dynamic sites on low-end hardware?
If you have low-end server hardware (e.g. 1GB or 2GB memory shared CPU hosting) will a dynamic scripting language (Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript) perform fast at serving dynamic pages? At what point will the language struggle where more performant languages might breeze through?
I know this might a bit like asking how long is a piece of string, but let's say 1000 users are concurrently accessing the site's pages which are mostly being dynamically generated. Would this be a breeze for dynamic languages on low-end hardware?
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That said, if any of the page renderings can be shared between users, such as using a framework that can do page fragment caching then you can approach that level especially if you can cache entire responses using nginx.
The real answer depends on some assumptions I'm making and questions
Assumption #1 - You're doing server side rendering because you talk about dynamically generated pages and not API response times.
Assumption #2 - You're using a database and it will be on the same instance as the web server.
Assumption #3 - You have one web server instance.
A web app that is focused on serving static assets with little customization, say putting a user name in the header and a separate profile page, could be fine if you use a CDN for the static assets and don't call the DB excessively.If you're calling the DB 200 times to generate a page, doing long running queries, or a lot of computation in the app layer you might be in trouble. (With my hypothetical 200 DB calls to load a page you're certainly not in a great spot :))
Does anyone know how to format a list? I can't figure out the magic incantation and https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc isn't helping much.