I used to work at a boring mid-sized finance-y company a while ago. Our stack was full Microsoft - IIS,ASP.NET,MS SQL, plus some appliance doing load balancing/API throttling stuff (not sure, not a sysadmin guy). The whole thing fit in a closet, handled 10k+ requests day and night.
All our code was basically - check user auth - do some stuff with the db/perhaps call out to some external service - serve request.
I never saw a single request above 50ms, with most being way less. Nobody ever talked about performance.
Then I moved to a fancy startup. EKS, nodejs servers, microservices of every denomination, GraphQL, every fashionable piece of tech cca 2018. I realized node was shockingly slow, and single threaded to boot, all that overhead added up to requests with a median latency of about 200ms, with the 99% latency measured in seconds.
Performance engineering was front and center, with dashboards, entire sprints dedicated to optimization, potential optimizations constantly considered, adding fake data and suspense to our React frontend, to hide latency etc. It was insane.
This has been my precisely my experience. There are lots of odd gotchas when working with these fancy stacks and the platform themselves often don't provide much benefit.
All our code was basically - check user auth - do some stuff with the db/perhaps call out to some external service - serve request.
I never saw a single request above 50ms, with most being way less. Nobody ever talked about performance.
Then I moved to a fancy startup. EKS, nodejs servers, microservices of every denomination, GraphQL, every fashionable piece of tech cca 2018. I realized node was shockingly slow, and single threaded to boot, all that overhead added up to requests with a median latency of about 200ms, with the 99% latency measured in seconds.
Performance engineering was front and center, with dashboards, entire sprints dedicated to optimization, potential optimizations constantly considered, adding fake data and suspense to our React frontend, to hide latency etc. It was insane.