What Does “Не тормозит” Mean?

This question usually arises when people see vintage (limited production) ClickHouse t-shirts. They have large words “ClickHouse не тормозит” on the front.

Before ClickHouse became open-source, it was developed as an in-house storage system by a large European IT company, Yandex. That’s why it initially got its slogan in Cyrillic, which is “не тормозит” (pronounced as “ne tormozit”). After the open-source release, we first produced some of those t-shirts for local events, and it was a no-brainer to use the slogan as-is.

One of the following batches of those t-shirts was supposed to be given away at international events, and we tried to make the English version of the slogan. Unfortunately, the original phrase is kind of elegant in terms of expressing stuff, and there was a restriction of limited space on a t-shirt, so we failed to come up with a good enough translation (most options appeared to be either long or inaccurate) and decided to keep the slogan even on t-shirts produced for international events. It appeared to be a great decision because people all over the world were positively surprised and curious when they saw it.

So, what does it mean? Here are some ways to translate “не тормозит”:

• If you translate it literally, it’d be something like “ClickHouse does not press the brake pedal”.
• Shorter, but not so precise versions could be “ClickHouse is not slow”, “ClickHouse does not lag” or just “ClickHouse is fast”.

If you haven’t seen one of those t-shirts in person, you can check them out online in many ClickHouse-related videos. For example, this one:

P.S. These t-shirts are not for sale, they were given away for free on some ClickHouse Meetups, usually as a gift for best questions or other forms of active participation. Now, these t-shirts are no longer produced, and they have become highly-valued collector's items.