I wanted to post this question in a neutral community and not the specific Lemmy or Piefed ones.
I am curious to learn how resource utilization is comparing in the real world operation of Piefed vs. Lemmy instances, given a similar level of users and user activity? Considering that Piefed is written in Python and Lemmy is written in Rust, I would think that the difference would be significant, but I recall someone mentioning in the past that the main resource constraint for both these platforms would be database-related instead so the language choice wouldn’t have much impact. I’m curious if this is proving correct in the real world as opposed to in theory.
I know that there are a few admins out there who are running both and I would love to hear their thoughts on this.
I run a personal lemmy instance and two personal piefed instances, so I was just doing some comparisons. My instances are mainly used for development and testing, so they are only subscribed to a handful of communities and just have one active user.
You are correct that when it comes to performance, like snappiness and responsiveness, the database is probably going to be the bottleneck. Unless you are scaling up to a huge degree, I would be surprised to see meaningful differences in the number of requests that could be handled due to language differences between rust and python. Yes, python is an interpreted language, but most of the libraries you are using are basically calling other system libraries written in a language like C, and the program can execute way faster than your database I/O can give it data to process anyway.
Here is my usage summary. The lemmy instance has been running for about 1.5 years while the piefed instance has been running for just shy of a year now. I have only included the memory usage and disk since I don’t think either is really CPU hungry or bound in my use case.
Thank you very much for your detailed reply! It’s interesting that they’re pretty similar. I had thought about that possibility of performance-critical Python libraries being being written in a system language. I appreciate it.
Choice of programming language rarely makes any noticeable difference in web services
Do you mean at smaller scales? I’ve read many articles in the past that say that some languages for web application servers perform better / require less resources for the same performance than others but maybe it makes more difference at larger scales.