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Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by PragmaticPulp on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @11:56AM (#29096414)
Obviously there is infinite room for optimization of this problem, but this was a fun blog post. I’m interested to see where the author goes with the series.
Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by lmilcin on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:13PM (#29096664)
It is interesting concept for a blog post but ruined by very inefficient implementation.

I would expect orders of magnitude more work done on ~20W.

Also parsing a compressed 10MB JSON seems like an unusual request. It would maybe be more fun to put a Hello World or Pet Store and get some numbers that will be more relatable to a regular developer.

Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by mhink on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:25PM (#29096825)
I mean, everyone's gotta start somewhere. I'll give the author props for coming up with an idea for an experiment, documenting it, and sharing their results. Not a whole lot of people do that out in the open, and it's great to see a bunch of responses with suggestions for further improvements. :)
Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by dylan604 on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:30PM (#29096903)
You must have a very low level of expectations of your fellow HN reader if you think that anything above a Hello World tutorial is relatable to a regular developer.
Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by lmilcin on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:32PM (#29096934)
How frequently do you test a new web framework with "10MB compressed JSONs"?

On the other hand you can find a lot of benchmarks that use basically Hello World just to test your request response or some rather small request/response sizes, because this is what most applications actually do. You can add a simple database query to it for more realistic load.

So, yes, this is more relatable to me as a backend developer because I can compare results more easily.

Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by dylan604 on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:35PM (#29096973)
I see the issue with your premise. I don't test web frameworks. I do real work <ducks>

I very much routinely look at large data sets. They just happen to be wrapped up in a different container than ZIP. Typically, they are delivered in MOV, MP4, WAV, etc. I look at a 10MB file and try to remember the last time I counted that small.

Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by egberts1 on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @01:49PM (#29098051)
But you do do a minimal HTTP-free baseline benchmark for better insight of your comparison purpose of all things above?, no?
Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by turtlebits on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:57PM (#29097302)
The test is for a web server, so you're optimizing for throughput on limited power, a static site would seem to be the best test.

If you want to test CPU load, the author should have tried Prime95 or some other similar test.

Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by f00zz on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @12:28PM (#29096868)
Years ago someone made a potato-powered web server. It was an 8-bit microcontroller with a custom TCP/IP stack, if I remember correctly.
Re:How much load can be served from 1m² of sunlight by forkfork on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @05:23PM (#29100458)
Intentionally inefficient. I’ve seen a number of my customers doing this pattern, working with ~10 meg JSON for the model layer.

Inefficient but not unrealistic outside of FAANG.