Reaching the ceiling of single-instance Go, Paschalis Tsilias

GoWayFest 4.0, Online – July 11-12, 2020

Reaching the ceiling of single-instance Go, Paschalis Tsilias

In the era of function-sized microservices, this talk explores the performance limits of a single-instance Go application. It hopes to answer questions such as “What’s the maximum number of goroutines and defers you can reasonably have?“, “How is resource usage growing with concurrent connections to a net/http server?“, or “At which point the GC slows down to a halt?
In this past decade, the industry has been trying to modularize deployments in smaller and smaller units. Today, horizontal scaling is almost the default; however Go is decent at scaling vertically as well. Exploring the most recent performance improvements in Go and how far you can get on a single-instance Go application will provide a technical measuring point on ‘when and how to scale’.