alt Hacker NewsNetworks are much faster than you think, it's networked software that tends to be slow. 10 GbE is now table stakes, you should fire any vendor who can't offer it. I certainly don't require your internet connection to be 10Gbps, or all your desktop machines, but your internal server network should be if you're building a new one in 2026, because there's no excuse not to any more.
> Information theory doesn't care how clever your loading indicator is. If the information isn't available, we can't do anything meaningful.
Yes we can - we can fix why the information isn't available. If someone said to you "sorry, we don't have the info because the other thread is doing Sleep(5000);" you'd call them an idiot right? You'd go and delete the sleep call to make it faster. Most real problems are harder than that, but there's no fundamental rule saying your database has to be slow. Ping time across your LAN is probably under a millisecond, so where are the other 299 milliseconds going? Is your database doing a full table scan? Is it using spinning rust for frequently accessed data?
The majority of companies are building their stuff entirely in the cloud, where network speed scales with the instance size. I have had to explain this to multiple engineers at multiple companies, who are surprised to learn that network bandwidth isn’t unlimited.
As to your database comment, IME most of the time the bottleneck is the ORM and/or language. The amount of work an ORM does to generate a representation of a row is frankly shocking. Not understanding the cost of context-switching is the language half of it: Python, of course, is single-threaded, but you can use greenlets to cheat, because they’re I/O bound — except for all of them serializing behind a single process handling serdes for the queries.