François Schiettecatte’s Blog

Being lazy sometimes pays off

Posted in Scaling, Software Development by François Schiettecatte on April 9, 2008

Interesting post on Gojko.net on how to make web sites go faster.

The crux of the article is summed up in these three points:

  • Delegate all long operations to a background process
  • Never ever talk to an external system synchronously, no matter how fast it is
  • Be lazy – if something does not have to be processed now, leave it for later

The one that resonated with me is the third one. The last search engine I built depended on two external libraries to support very specific foreign languages. One of these libraries took a while to initialize so I would only do it only when I knew it was going to be needed rather than doing the initialization with every new search that came in.

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