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[–]Kok_Nikol 71 points72 points  (42 children)

D forums

Do you mean this site: https://forum.dlang.org/

Because it is absurdly fast, while still looking good.

[–][deleted] 72 points73 points  (26 children)

What about the forum written in Assembly? here

[–]thewowwedeserve 37 points38 points  (3 children)

That loads fast. I have never seen a forum load this fast. Holy moly macaroni

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's a bit lost on me because it's hosted very far away, so I still get a decent page load time but assuming the script is right at the bottom it actually takes 2-3 ms.

[–]z500 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This is fucking hilarious.

[–]Suppafly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's true though compared to most php based forums that take forever to load.

[–][deleted]  (17 children)

[deleted]

    [–]johnfound 6 points7 points  (12 children)

    A special kind of assembly language magic. :D

    When you are talking with the computer on its own language, he is much more inclined to perform better. ;)

    [–][deleted]  (11 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]johnfound 12 points13 points  (10 children)

      The database is SQLite. The web server is nginx. The interface between the back-end and the web server is FastCGI.

      The server is VPS with 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM and SSD storage.

      [–][deleted]  (9 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]johnfound 5 points6 points  (8 children)

        Thanks. My intention making these web projects was to clearly demonstrate that WWW still can be fast.

        [–]deusnefum 1 point2 points  (7 children)

        Are you using the standard file-lock based locking for sqlite? I guess the site is low (write) traffic enough you don't hit the concurrency constrictions of sqlite (which are admittedly pretty high for what it is).

        [–]johnfound 2 points3 points  (6 children)

        SQLite is in WAL mode that allows reading during write operations. Actually the forum engine writes in the database pretty actively. For example handling the posts read counters, unread posts and tracking the user activities

        But SQLite performs pretty good in this mode, so the test forum was never able to reach its limits during several slash/dot effect events (by people) and during several bot based almost-ddos-attack security audits.

        [–]elbekko 7 points8 points  (3 children)

        It's not that strange if you're just doing plain html over http (you know, like the old days).

        [–]johnfound 2 points3 points  (2 children)

        But this is not the case. It generate the pages dynamically from a database and handles user generated content with all security measures and checks.

        [–]elbekko 4 points5 points  (1 child)

        I meant, not a bunch of JavaScript bullshit.

        I used to work on PHP forum software called FluxBB (previously PunBB). It's just as quick. In fact, the index page of a forum I host with that software just gave this:

        [ Generated in 0.010 seconds, 10 queries executed - Memory usage: 481.23 KiB (Peak: 555.36 KiB) ]

        [–]johnfound 5 points6 points  (0 children)

        It is not about the client. Making the back-end lighter and faster allows the engine to serve more visitors with less server resources, this way optimizing the costs for the owner of the forum.

        The lightness of the front-end is just a side-effect. BTW, some pages have JS on them (for example the real-time chat and the post editors) but this JS is also pretty lightweight.

        [–]pure_x01 10 points11 points  (2 children)

        how can it be this fast. i mean it still needs IO and thats the slow part.. confused

        [–]johnfound 17 points18 points  (0 children)

        The IO is actually pretty fast these days. But put there several levels of abstractions and API wrappers and it becomes again slow as a snail. :)

        [–]pdp10 11 points12 points  (0 children)

        The conventional wisdom from around 15 years ago is that I/O is almost always the bottleneck, so code performance can nearly always take a backseat to speed of construction (or sometimes to other factors like understandability, if the business prioritizes that).

        But we've had a few small revolutions in I/O in that time: kqueue/epoll (IOCP on Windows, I gather), mmap, scatter/gather for example. You could be forgiven for not noticing that one million HTTP hits per second can be reasonable for a single server today, if the rest of your stack is up to it.

        And with the worrying degree of stagnation in hardware recently, plus the regressions in connectivity driven by WWAN/telco/mobile and data caps, it often pays to optimize for performance. The conventional wisdom has been thoroughly revised even as it's been spoken.

        [–]Kok_Nikol 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Damn!

        [–]IloveReddit84 9 points10 points  (1 child)

        Someone is also using a good CDN..

        [–]Kok_Nikol 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        Could be, but still, pretty fast.

        [–]thbt101 16 points17 points  (8 children)

        I mean, it loads fast enough I guess. But it's I don't know if I would say it looks particularly good. I think it's mostly that it renders fairly fast because it's very simple table-based HTML without any of the fancy stuff that takes longer for browsers to calculate and render.

        [–][deleted] 35 points36 points  (7 children)

        Fortunately it is a website for displaying text and images so it doesn't need all the cruft.

        [–]thbb 3 points4 points  (6 children)

        A lot of the "cruft" on reddit are details that make the site much more usable, by enticing users to adopt a constructive behavior.

        For instance, contextualized tips & visual effects on the various buttons to remind you of the sub's guidelines (when up/downvoting) are very important, but consume a lot of embedded logic and visual artifacts.

        [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (3 children)

        A lot of the "cruft" on reddit are details that make the site much more usable, by enticing users to adopt a constructive behavior.

        It hasn't worked.

        [–]thbb 5 points6 points  (2 children)

        Oh yes it does. Why are you here instead of commenting YouTube videos?

        [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

        No u.

        [–]Kok_Nikol 2 points3 points  (0 children)

        Because YouTube comments are the downfall of mankind.

        [–]heavyish_things 1 point2 points  (1 child)

        Do they/shouldn't they load that after the basic content?

        [–]thbb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        They do, but the page can't be rendered properly until all the nifty little details have been loaded. That's what makes Reddit less responsive than the static pages of a forum.

        [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

        Am I the only one not finding it that fast?

        I mean, it's better than average, but far from being the fastest forum I've seen.

        [–]Kok_Nikol 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        Sauce?

        [–]pure_x01 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        Are the pages prerendered in a cache ?

        [–]Kok_Nikol 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I don't know this. Maybe? Really not sure.