I’ve been playing with the tech to rewrite the backend here. I’ll start getting to work on doing that probably next week. And I want to move away from web sockets, combine the front end service with the backend service. will take a while but I think it will be fun to do.
I find it surprising that you actually have performance problems. We used to run lemmy.ml on a 2 cpu vps for 10€ a month, without any problems. Recently we upgraded to 4 cpu due to some kind of ddos, but now resource usage is quite low (load average under 1). Maybe you can share some screenshots of htop or similar (via pm if you want).
Its true that lemmy-ui (nodejs) is not very efficient, but in practice it seems barely noticable. And nginx is very fast, written in C.