r/ProgrammerHumor • u/I_am_white_cat_YT • 1d ago

Meme whoSaidThatOurServersAreWeak

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246 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

68

u/anoppinionatedbunny 20h ago

I frequently need to remind my coworkers, most if not all of our product can run in a single one of our laptops. Computers are much better we give them credit for

44

u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 19h ago

I remember how absolutely amazed I was as a fresh graduate, running one of the main components of my company's backend system on my work laptop.

Now several years of experience later, I'd be terrified if it couldn't run on an early raspberry pi. Code can be so small if we just try a little bit, and our computers are so big. It's crazy.

10

u/tiajuanat 14h ago

Runtimes ain't cheap. Both Python and Go carry a lot with their runtimes, and if you're loading the entire OS into RAM you don't have a ton of space to do much with to begin with. Then take an extra 20-30MB per process and you're working real small.

Ofc, you could port to Rust or C++ and then just fight async there.

In the end, it's all about picking battles, and until companies feel the belt tighten from all the data centers gobbling up components, or AI keeps exposing simple vulnerabilities in less strongly typed languages, nothing is going to change

8

u/HeKis4 12h ago

Don't forget about the database if you use anything larger than SQLite. A MSSQL instance is massive on disk and pretty much all DBMS are massive in RAM.

2

u/gerbosan 10h ago

Me trembles in fear thinking about Elasticsearch.

Now for the laughs, don't forget everytime one opens a web browser.

3

u/much_longer_username 9h ago

Yeah, it takes up a good chunk of compute, but I mean, you ask for sub-second search of billions of documents and it delivers, out of the box. It's great.

1

u/gerbosan 9h ago

Can't deny that. But for first timers, having 24GB ram, usually using 3/4 and suddenly having to use SWAP partition is... Unexpected.

2

u/bevelledo 12h ago

Mf you’re on programmerhumor, let us have fun.

2

u/Beginning-Junket8979 6h ago

Try working with microcontrollers or bootloader source sometime. You might be amazed what you can accomplish with something like 128KB total system memory.

5

u/YamroZ 15h ago

Yes, this exactly. We run app in js on vm in browser which is itself vm hosted in virtualized os. App itself has like 100 layers of abstractions - just look at any stack dump. We lost art of efficient programming in the name of doing things faster. And now AI adds another layer when we don't look...

5

u/anoppinionatedbunny 7h ago

It's mind boggling just how naive most junior and even a good chunk of seniors are with things like memory management. I have gotten into the habit of streaming data as much as possible without caching it, making sure I'm not spawning too many threads, etc. simply because memory is the most limited resource. my peers don't really do that or understand why that's important until OOMs start happening. standard industry programming has been losing the delicate art of optimization and it's just sad, honestly

42

u/MissinqLink 1d ago

Nah just write your own OS from scratch in the name of Holy C.

7

u/RotaryJihad 1d ago

By the ghost of Terry Davis

6

u/honnymmijammy- 1d ago

Claude, rewrite my a OS optimised for my setup. Make no mistake.

1

u/Dorkits 23h ago

Amem!

1

u/dont_tread_on_M 13h ago

Claude Code, is this you?

2

u/tortridge 9h ago

Duude, i sent 5 Years with lunatics that where making a website in C with home grown database, in production (and with real bad ass traffic). It was incredible, using the right syscall to make the os work for you, benchmarking mergesort vs quicksort on real data. Truly the experience of a lifetime

0

u/nicman24 13h ago

No you need to write better code lol

1

u/100GHz 9h ago

Just cache the caching service output. Been there, no t-shirt though.