zlacker

Airbnb is a great example of a terrible experience that just keeps getting worse. It makes my M1 Mac, my 32 core workstation and my top of the line android device chug.

>>maccar+(OP)
The shininess of the engineering blog and the actual product seem to be completely disconnected. All the major players (Airbnb, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) go on about all these often genuinely impressive perf optimizations, but if you actually try the product they're borderline unusable. It's pretty clear that the blogging is just a clout chasing exercise, but the cognitive dissonance is still palpable.

>>rozap+i5
I think Airbnb is the worst offender by far though. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (just using your examples) operate very dynamic applications at a global scale. AirBnB is a crud app with almost no dynamic content other than the booking system. According to the first site I saw online, they process 6 bookings per second, which I could handle on literally anything with an internet connection. Of all of them, its the one I understand the least.

>>rozap+i5
From experience at Facebook: there are extremely good people working on performance and making heroic optimizations. The blog content is real. However, these are necessary precisely because the politics and culture of the organization make it impossible to avoid bloat that accumulates faster than the small minority of perf-conscious folks can improve things.

>>maccar+dg
I thought this sounded way too low but the most generous figure I can find is 12 per second in 2022. What the hell? I thought it would be more. Should I have thought that? I guess not.

>>steve_+8n
6 bookings per second at $200 per booking is $103M processed per day.

Each booking likely represents dozens to hundreds of requests. Then, for every visit resulting in a booking there’s probably hundreds of non-booking visits.

>>sa46+Wz
> 6 bookings per second at $200 per booking is $103M processed per day.

I don't doubt that they don't prcess a lot of money - that's besides the point.

They're a cookie cutter CRUD app (that happens to process a lot of money) that takes _hundreds_ of requests and 12 seconds to load on a 32 core workstation with a gigabit fibre internet connection. They have no business writing a blog on performance engineering.

>>sa46+Wz
If your CRUD app's booking endpoint internally fans out to 100s of requests, you're doing something extremely wrong and/or you've dug yourself into microservice hell.