

What makes something "notable"? - lehgo
http://gwan.com/blog/20121027.html
http://gwan.com/blog/20121027.html
======
FooBarWidget
This submission was originally called "Node.js is all just hype"!

Apparently after 10 comments, the submitter renamed it to "What makes
something notable?". At <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514> I read
that:

    
    
        "Pierre (the sole G-WAN author) says some funny things. He
        also defends G-WAN using dummy accounts all over the internet
        (StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc)."
    

The submitter, lehgo, happens to be created a week ago, and his only
submissions have been about G-WAN. Coincidence?

~~~
lehgo
I just found the gwan topic interesting and the blog posts even more so. To
eliminate any sort of crazy conspiracy theories, I am in no way shape and or
form associated with gwan,nginx,msql,mongodb ect ect.

I enjoy using gwan for my projects. So far my stack is usually
nginx+gwan+mysql+mongodb.I use nginx for it's modules and it's PHP support. I
use gwan to write C scripts and which is basically the original PHP scripts
just converted to C for way better performance. I'v used PHP for a while now
so much that I have grown to absolutely hate how slow it is. Still, PHP is
easy to dev with so I keep it in my stack.

Also i did not rename the topic someone else did as stated in one of the first
comments by the person who actually did the change.

That being said you are incorrect on your first point "submitter renamed it"
and paranoid on your second "Coincidence?".

I usually post about gwan that being only 2 topics so far because it just so
happens to be my current interest in my field of work.

~~~
FooBarWidget
If what you're saying is legit then I encourage you to continue doing what
you've been doing. I too am interested in G-WAN, but I just wish the
documentation and articles have more technical substance, and I wish someone
with a long, good track record can comment on it.

------
dano
There are various 'tells' in the user documentation that indicates a lack of
flexibility in the product and its authors. That aside, it is a very fast
server and if you write your servlets in C, those too will be quite speedy.

These are some of the points in the documentation that give some discomfort.
There are legitimate reasons to have additional flexibility and I really don't
care to have language rants in otherwise objective and factual user
documentation.

\- Log files are set to a fixed naming convention

\- Log files are rotated at midnight - it appears there is no method of
adjusting this time period

\- On mime-types "As this list is hard-coded you cannot add MIME types in
G-WAN but we will add any type that makes sense if users ask for it."

\- "How many languages do you need to learn if one of them works better than
all? C made Unix, Windows, games, PDF viewers, Web browsers. C servlets will
be limited by your sole imagination. C survived 40 years for a reason: it fits
the task."

\- "And take Javascript's optional semicolon to end statements (that was the
case in some pointlessly complex parts of the JS code of the demo: a JS
function defining a nested function as a parameter...). When a carriage-return
replaces a semicolon then G-WAN's JS minifying (also used with HTML embedding
JS) breaks the code by removing carriage-returns that 40-year-old C can safely
ditch (not the more 'modern' Javascript which is far more commonly reformated
to lower network latency). The mark of pure genius at work: creating problems
that have no reason to exist."

------
benjaminRRR
Like others I couldn't get beyond the formatting - the website looked like it
was shouting at me. Hard to take something seriously when it's displayed like
a ransom note.

------
boothead
I've seen some comments/postings to HN about g-wan, and I still can't work out
if it's some really elaborate troll or not. Has anyone played with it? I can't
imagine that this very strange license section in the FAQ:
<http://gwan.ch/faq#license>, is going to help people want to try it!

 _edit_ Grammar

~~~
Torn
The formatting and the delivery on that site are confusing; both feel somewhat
aggressive. It could just be a chinese / cultural / marketing thing we're not
used to, or maybe the author's a little _too_ confident.

Based on a quick google, it does appear GWAN is massively fast at serving
static files, and it does appear to be gaining traction for script-based use-
cases.

I'd be interested in seeing more real-world benchmarks.

~~~
FooBarWidget
The guy is from Switzerland: <http://gwan.ch/about>

Is anybody actually using G-WAN in production?

------
soup10
I see most new developments in web technologies as layers upon layers of
frameworks designed to make it easier to create ever more complex web-based
applications that will ultimately become irrelevant when people realize that
the complexity and the scaling requirements of the applications being created
are much better served by normal non-web focused programming languages.

With the success of the app store on iOS, vendors are realizing the value of
eliminating the friction involved in installing native 'apps'. The sooner this
happens the better, since it will mean much better software overall. Mail
clients, word processors and mapping applications should not be written in
javascript.

It's a damn shame that the OS vendors refuse to work together to make easily
cross-platform native applications a reality. Thankfully though, if they
create frictionless ways to use native code, frameworks and what not should be
able to bridge the gap between OS specific API's and the hardware without
performance issues. Moore's law will never make javascript word-processors
good.

Javascript on the back-end just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why not pick
a programming language that was designed for the job, not something that was
hacked together so it's somewhat passable at the job?

(by native i'm referring to languages traditionally used to bulid complex
software, not just c/c++)

------
p3drosola
Lol, nice try at a bit of self-promotion there.

This guy obviously doesn't know node. He's comparing node.js to a dedicated
webserver, when they are completely different things.

~~~
dccoolgai
Agreed - the article content is misleading at best..and some of the other
comments on this thread smell like astroturf.

------
olalonde
tl;dr: Guy is angry at Wikipedia because his web server doesn't meet
Wikipedia's "notability" requirements while Node.js does. Ah, also his server
is faster than Node.js. Here's a HN comment thread about G-WAN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514>

------
FennNaten
Managed to get throught the odd formatting, and I don't think the article's
worth it. That's too bad, 'cause the idea looked interesting: it's true that
parts of developers' community are subject to the "go onto hype" phenomenon,
and I'd have read with pleasure a serious analysis of that, which could open a
constructive debate. But here it's only a big rant mixed with conspiracy
theory, about "why does everybody speaks about anything but g-wan", made up by
somebody who obviously wants to get some buzz for his product.

------
mikkom
That's some really odd text formatting.

~~~
lis
At first I thought he used some kind of text-generator, where you just have to
fill in some blanks with buzzwords.

------
klearvue
The aggressive tone is off-putting, the formatting is distracting and the
target of criticism seems to be Wikipedia, as well as Node. Talk about
concurrency.

------
scotty79
They really should make this open source and switch to community model of
development.

Same thing I've seen with Rebol. Freeware but closed source = no trust from
users.

~~~
MetaCosm
It is kinda sad. The performance of his stack is second to none (in my testing
he undersells it). I really do like configuration via directory structure, and
it has various cool tooling in it.

That said, yeah, the freeware / closed source seems to be the worst combo. But
who would buy a web server they couldn't test first?

Also, the guys crazy (ala Tesla, crazy smart) personality is allowed to shine
though on his site. He needs a marketing person to keep him the hell away from
the customers. Make an ultra cheap or developers "trail" (no freeware), etc.

~~~
klue
> "who would buy a web server they couldn't test first?"

G-WAN is a freeware that can be downloaded from its web site.

How "neutral" in a debate is such kind of false claims that G-WAN can't be
tested?

~~~
FooBarWidget
Klue, calm down. The website's navigation isn't exactly the most intuitive. I
can imagine that to a lot of people it isn't immediately obvious that they can
download and use it for free.

------
Einherji
I hear this a lot. Node.js seems to have gained quite a bit of popularity
though, I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly.

~~~
w0utert
> _I see developers swear by it like a religion regularly._

To me, that signals there is at least _something_ fishy about the technology.

I'm not saying Node is bad, but I sincerely have the impression that a large
majority of developers who like Node.js are mainly using it because it's 'hot
technology' right now, not because it fits their technology problem so well.
Event-based asynchronous servers are nice for some things, but definitely not
for everything. If that were the case, Twistd and Tornado would have been much
more popular before Node.js even existed. My perception is that Node.js is
primarily popular because it attracted hordes of client-side developers to
server programming, something that used to be too inaccessible before. Hard to
dislike something that instantly gives you the impression you can write your
own servers.

~~~
Jare
Node is not everything to everyone, but for a lot of people, it's the right
technology at the right time.

\- Easy to install and use, especially for hordes of client side developers.

\- Easy to manage packages and dependencies via npm.

\- Fast and scalable for writing logic around data transportation.

~~~
w0utert
I would say Python frameworks like Flask or Pyramid offer the first 2 benefits
as well, and when used properly in combination with a caching proxy and
container server that allows asynchronous processing the 3rd benefit too. So
they are not unique to Node.js although out-of-the-box, as a standalone
application server, Node will be faster.

Which leaves the 'JavaScript comfort zone' as the main driver of Node
popularity, which while understandable, IMO isn't exactly a technological
benefit, rather a downside (I don't like JavaScript, at all).

------
FooBarWidget
I modded this submission up not because I agree with it but because I want a
discussion. The G-WAN author has been known being... confident. He claims to
be faster and more scalable than Nginx by a significant factor. He attributes
the speed partially to the fact that his code contains few branches, where he
defines even function calls as branches. Both statements are bold claims, and
I can only imagine how it would take a genius to maintain "branchless" code
like that.

Leaving that aside, I feel that the article focuses too much on the hype
words. Yes some of the hype is over the top and focuses too much on the
coolness factor, yes some of the reasons given for using Node is total
nonsense (e.g. what he quoted from the Wikipedia article). But none of that
invalidates the valid reasons for choosing Node:

\- Javascript is so much easier to program for than C/C++. This is a fact; he
mentioned it several times in his article but then brushes off these claims.
Writing Phusion Passenger 4's new evented architecture in C++ has been an
extremely intensive effort. There's just so much you need to be aware of and
take care of, Javascript would have speeded up development significantly. If
course we couldn't and didn't: being system software, Phusion Passenger's core
cannot rely on Javascript and must be optimized for speed.

\- Javascript is _fast enough_ for quite a lot of server software. Of course C
wipes the floor with everything. If you don't mind spending 4 times longer to
ship your product to market. Oh yeah, good luck recruiting that brilliant C
programmer, I hope you live in a place where they are easy to come by. His
bold claim that G-WAN's Javascript engine uses 2444x less resources is a bold
one, but if in the end you have 2 million users and you can still handle them
with 1 or 2 servers, then switching to G-WAN does not give you a lot of added
advantage.

\- G-WAN runs everything in-process!! Of course everything is faster then!!!
It's because there's no need to perform inter-process communication and CPU
synchronization, which often require (relatively slow) kernel intervention.
But if one component dies, your entire web server goes down. Better hope the
application programmer never makes a mistake. With Phusion Passenger we've
explicitly chosen not to utilize an in-process architecture because it causes
to much pain, even if it's faster.

There's also at least one logical fallacy in the article:

_"Node.js' CPU & RAM usage is so high that the scale had to be resized. The
chaotic curves do not give the feeling of anything seriously engineered."_

He puts two separate scales in the same graph and then claims this? That
doesn't make any sense.

Where is the source code for the benchmark? How did the benchmark look like
and what's the methodology? No mention of it.

I wish the G-WAN author would focus more on the technicalities instead of
trying to fight the hype. That would make the entire article much more
interesting. Why is G-WAN faster? What's the difference between Node and
G-WAN's Javascript engine? Etcetera. G-WAN is a very interesting product but
it would have so much more potential if the author communicates in a less
inflammatory and emotional way, and behaves more professionally.

~~~
klue
@FooBarWidget, an obvious Phusion Passenger troll (look at his posts)

> "Javascript is so much easier to program for than C"

G-WAN offers both. And 13 other languages.

> if you have 2 million users then switching to G-WAN does not give you a lot
> of added advantage

Node.js will never survive 2 million users if it faints at 1 thousand users.

> "Why is G-WAN faster?"

For the same reason that makes Nginx faster than Apache: better coding.

> "What's the difference between Node and G-WAN's Javascript engine?"

None. You criticize without reading. It is said that "G-WAN runs node.js as a
script engine (which results in testing V8)".

> "Where is the source code for the benchmark?"

On the site that you claim that you have read.

> "G-WAN is a very interesting product but it would have so much more
> potential if the author behaves more professionally."

Hmmm... you probably mean, like you?

You "moderated" this Hackers News entry to:

    
    
      - spread FUD about G-WAN
      and
      - promote Phusion Passenger (your product)
    

Phusion Passenger is not censored on Wikipedia because, like Node.js, it is
much slower than G-WAN.

Maybe that's why you ask how G-WAN manages to be so much faster?

~~~
FooBarWidget
> @FooBarWidget, an obvious Phusion Passenger troll (look at his posts)

Correction, I am one of the Phusion Passenger _authors_. I do not make this a
secret.

You seem to have misunderstood my response for trolling. I apologize if I came
over like that, but all I want is some critical discussion and better
explanations than grand claims without proof.

> G-WAN offers both. And 13 other languages.

I never said it didn't. I merely said there are legit reasons for using
Javascript over C.

> Node.js will never survive 2 million users if it faints at 1 thousand users.

> For the same reason that makes Nginx faster than Apache: better coding.

Ok, now give me some details. These statements are meaningless on their own.
"will never survive" contradicts real-world examples in which Node obviously
_did_ survive. Also, under what hardware? What networks? What operating
systems? Under what test conditions?

Nginx is faster than Apache because of "better coding"? That vague statement
doesn't mean anything. Nginx is faster than Apache partially because of its
architecture: evented vs multiprocessing/multithreading, speed at the cost of
flexibility, memory allocation patterns, etc. Nginx isn't anywhere near the
swiss army knife that Apache is, and as soon as it is it will become
comparable in performance. I can pinpoint specific areas in Nginx and explain
why they're faster than the equivalent in Apache. Can you do that with G-WAN
vs the rest?

I'm looking an in-depth technical study of what makes G-WAN faster than the
competition, not vague grand statements.

> On the site that you claim that you have read.

They have the source code for the benchmarking app but not the hello world
app. Direct link please.

> You "moderated" this Hackers News entry to: > \- spread FUD about G-WAN

Calm down, this isn't a war. I apologize if it come over as FUD, but it was
merely critical curiosity.

> and > \- promote Phusion Passenger (your product)

Correct. I make no attempt to hide this. In fact, I challenge you to find any
promotional messages that are not based on facts. I do not, and do not want
to, promote my products with FUD or inaccuracies.

> Phusion Passenger is not censored on Wikipedia because, like Node.js, it is
> much slower than G-WAN.

What do censoring and Wikipedia have to do with this? And correct, it is
slower. We focus on ease of use, reliability, stability and features, not raw
performance. If highest req/sec at the cost of everything else is what you
want, then you are looking at the wrong product.

I cannot help but feel that your statement that Phusion Passenger is "much
slower" than G-WAN is an attack in an attempt to defend G-WAN. Again, it is
not my intention to troll or spread FUD on G-WAN.

> Maybe that's why you ask how G-WAN manages to be so much faster?

Yes, that is exactly why. As an application server author I am constantly
seeking to improve my knowledge and skills in this area.

Performance is not always the end goal. It comes at a cost. Nginx is not
faster than Apache because it's "better coded" but because of tradeoffs in
architecture and features. Likewise, there are ways to make Phusion Passenger
faster, but they come at the cost of reduced code maintainability, reduced
feature set, etc.

And uhm, klue, whoever you are... please don't reply from a newly created
account made for the mere sake of replying to me. I want a civilized,
technical discussion, not a pissing contest. Please reply with your real
account.

------
bulletmagnet
I got a strong time cube vibe from that site.

------
notallama
how is this website so ugly?

------
bitJericho
This blog is really hard to read. What's with all the colored rectangles
around the words. Tiring...

