Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276613

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Do you think they intentionally hid the KPI to avoid scaring investors?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977922

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I'm going to reflect on the feedback, rewrite the article with better explanations of the problem domain, and its limitations. I've clearly failed to articulate the core capability: dynamic file bundling via query parameters into a unified multipart stream.

I'll check back over the next few days but won't be monitoring constantly. If you want to discuss this project privately, I’m available by email.

Edit: The hello-world.html was also generated.

The "inherently expensive" claim was overstated - it's expensive relative to static file serving, and unavoidable, but you're correct that there are optimization opportunities in the current implementation. I've identified three opportunities to improve the design: boundary generation, content type assignment, and header construction.

One clarification: the dynamic bundling via query parameters limits traditional caching strategies. Since each request can specify different file combinations, the multipart response structure must be generated per-request rather than cached.

Axon also represents a core framework. How you implement caching depends on your specific use case - this becomes business logic rather than request processing logic. Its minimal tooling is intended to be a feature, though, as you have pointed out, it can also be limiting.

For static file serving, sendfile would be the better choice.

Lower-level languages would certainly offer higher performance. I was hoping to showcase how Python can perform when architecture is restrained. The goal was to show that careful design choices (bounded memory, generator-based streaming) can maintain predictable behavior even when computational resources are exhausted.

Thanks for pointing out the ambiguity.

The multipart streaming workload is inherently expensive. The cost of generating boundaries and constructing headers scales with request count and payload size. The architecture demonstrates efficient resource utilization: bounded memory usage (<225MB) while maximizing CPU throughput.

CPU saturation with bounded memory means performance scales predictably with processing power. On multicore systems, you can leverage multiple processes to effectively utilize all cores. Alternatively, you can distribute the workload horizontally using droplets as cost-efficient instances.

- PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/axon-api/

- GitHub: https://github.com/b-is-for-build/axon-api

- Deployment Script: https://github.com/b-is-for-build/axon-api/blob/master/examp...

Axon is a 507-line, pure Python WSGI framework that achieves up to 237MB/s file streaming on $8/month hardware. The key feature is the dynamic bundling of multiple files into a single multipart stream while maintaining bounded memory (<225MB). The implementation saturates CPU before reaching I/O limits.

Technical highlights:

- Pure Python stdlib implementation (no external dependencies)

- HTTP range support for partial content delivery

- Generator-based streaming with constant memory usage

- Request batching via query parameters

- Match statement-based routing (eliminates traversal and probing)

- Built-in sanitization and structured logging

The benchmarking methodology uses fresh Digital Ocean droplets with reproducible wrk tests across different file sizes. All code and deployment scripts are included.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44951676

Points: 21

# Comments: 16

I just stumbled upon this old project and decided it was time for a significant update. I am currently in the process of refactoring the framework to add comprehensive documentation and unit testing. Once complete, I'm considering open-sourcing it to the community.

However, I'm unsure if there's enough interest to justify the time and effort required. If not, I'm happy to keep using the framework privately.

Thoughts?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42813909

Points: 2

# Comments: 0