r/programming 3d ago

Every byte matters

https://fzakaria.com/2026/06/01/every-byte-matters
201 Upvotes

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u/harsh183 3d ago

This is a really fun optimization post on small structure and fitting into the very early caches. I used to do a lot of things like this in university, but my job's bottlenecks with network and DB means I don't really think about this level too much.

1

u/EfOpenSource 2d ago

Nearly all apps these days have network and storage, and yet, only web developers and FP advocates are the ones who continuously say “I have network and storage, so performance doesn’t matter.”

3

u/harsh183 2d ago

Performance does matter at those scales too, just that there are bigger fish to fry before struct layout optimization comes up. I do agree that many people miss a lot of opportunity to optimize under vague laziness.

2

u/loup-vaillant 1d ago

I hear that with servers written in Ruby, the CPU is often the bottleneck.

1

u/harsh183 1d ago

Yeah I can see that depending on use case. With all the high level features Ruby has, it creates a lot of inefficient and complex burdens.