Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.

Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?

App support is one thing I can think of.

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[–] Sibshops@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)

While theoretically true, the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL for that, I somewhat doubt that Piefed being written in Python will have much noticeable effect in reality.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago

the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL

Postgres being a bottleneck is a first for me. Not saying it's not possible, just... It's postgres. Wondering if it's more an issue with ORM, etc.

[–] msage@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Postgres is so quick if you know how to use it...

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't even need to know how to use it very well, in my experience.

[–] msage@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Really depends on many factors. If you have everything in RAM, almost nothing matters.

If your dataset outgrows the capacity, various things start to matter, based on your workload. Random reads need to have good indices (also writes with unique columns), OLAPs benefit from work_mem, >100M rows will need good partitioning, OLTP may even need some custom solutions if you need to keep a long history, but not for every transaction.

But even with >B of rows, Postgres can handle it with relative ease, if you know what you're doing. Usually even on a hardware you would consider absolutely inadequate (last year I migrated our company DB from MySQL to Postgres, and with even more data and more complex workflows we downsized our RAM by more than half).

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you're running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you're running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you want it to be "free to most users", the cost of data storage and IO will completely dominate over the cost of CPU.

There are plenty of good arguments to prefer Rust over python for a distributed application, but "language efficiency" is not one of them.

Anyway, if you are biased in favor of Rust and want a decent argument to justify it, I will let you use 'It's easier to compile Rust to WASM and have the application run on the browser, while compiling python in a cross-platform way is a nightmare', free of charge.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago

Ease of cross-compiling is really one of my favorite things about Rust. It can run anywhere with little coaxing needed.