Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
by whstl on Saturday December 23, 2023 @09:49AM
(#38744593)
I never really stopped to think about it, but ASP was indeed quite performant, considering it was all interpreted, running in late 90s shared-hosting hardware with very little RAM and super slow hard disks. The site got a few thousand active users and worked quite well, apart from the DB size limits.
Fast forward 10, 20, almost 30 years and I frequently encounter websites that struggle to work under the same load, even with expensive AWS bills, especially when working with Rails.
Perhaps ASP was performant because the site was a few orders of magnitudes smaller than anything you'd see today, even though it was full featured. Probably 1000x or 10000x smaller if I also include third-party libraries in the count. It was quite comparable to serverless/edge computing actually.
Fast forward 10, 20, almost 30 years and I frequently encounter websites that struggle to work under the same load, even with expensive AWS bills, especially when working with Rails.
Perhaps ASP was performant because the site was a few orders of magnitudes smaller than anything you'd see today, even though it was full featured. Probably 1000x or 10000x smaller if I also include third-party libraries in the count. It was quite comparable to serverless/edge computing actually.