Slashdot Mirror
Black Friday '14: E-commerce Pages Far Slower Than They Were in 2013
An anonymous reader writes Black Friday news kicked off this weekend quite early when Best Buy was hit with a massive outage, but it turns out that was only half the story. The top 50 e-commerce websites were slower overall this year compared to last, suggesting customers were frustrated even if they could get to their favorite shopping site. Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems looked at aggregate performance this weekend and compared it to the same timeframe in 2013. The results are notable: desktop web pages were 19.85 percent slower, while mobile web pages were a whopping 57.21 percent slower.
Jesus died for your sins. The least you can do is die for a TV. /sarc.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The big performance problem for modern websites is the relational database.
Even our favorite NoSQL databases are still relational. What is it that connects a document GUID and its data in a document database? A relation! What is it that connects a key with its value in a key-store database? A relation!
Let me say it clearly: DATABASE RELATIONS NEED TO GO!
We need to move to a database model where there are no relations at all. As we've seen, relations mean poor performance!
Relational databases need to become old hat. Document databases need to become old hat. Key-value stores need to become old hat.
Instead, we need database technology that is new hat. This database technology already exists, and they're called array databases.
There are no tables. There are no documents. There are no key-value stores. There are just arrays.
Each array element holds exactly one piece of information. That's what makes it fast! There aren't any relations to deal with. It's just pure data, as fast as can be.
If you want to get your data, you just get it! There are no queries or mappings or any slow crap like that. Your website just gets the data it needs and displays it. It's fast because it's simple.
If you want to sort your data, you just use quicksort. It's the fastest sort that exists.
See, there's no SQL, there's no JavaScript, there's nothing that's slow! It's just arrays, and arrays are fast. That's what makes these databases so great. They're as fast as can be.