The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser
The Real Hidden Cost of a Request
Dec 13, 2023
Explore the hidden costs of sending a request from the frontend to the backend, including performance implications and challenges in determining backend capacity. Dive into the intricacies of handling requests in the backend, such as establishing connections, data decryption, parsing requests, and hidden complexities. Understand the process of parsing and decoding a request in backend engineering, including challenges with binary protocols, the cost of serialization and deserialization, importance of byte representation, and potential for splitting CPU-heavy tasks.
13:08
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Quick takeaways
- Accepting the connection is a crucial step in the journey of a request and requires proxies and web servers to handle, with the number of processes accepting connections varying.
- Decrypting the data is often a significant step in the journey of a request, adding additional costs and complexity to the backend server's process of reading and understanding the contents of the request.
Deep dives
Step 1: Acceptance of the Connection
The first step in the journey of a request is the acceptance of the connection, which is the vehicle through which the request is sent. This connection is usually established using a transport protocol, commonly referred to as layer four in the OSI model. Accepting the connection is not a trivial task and requires proxies and web servers to handle. The number of processes accepting connections can vary, and it is crucial to have a functioning connection for the request to proceed.
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