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Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?
I'm curious about the hardware used to run Hacker News. My guts tell me that despite its popularity it is running on modest hardware, but I'd like to confirm.
- ekr 10y agoMy bet is on AWS, but I'm also rather curious about this.
- avikalpa 10y agoYou're rather mistaken my friend. Hacker News existed a long time before AWS. It has 2 servers - 1 production, 1 standby, running FreeBSD. FreeBSD is the OS of choice for them.
- nailer 10y agoHrm it's behind a web app firewall (server:cloudflare-nginx) so harder to tell.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jaflo 10y agoWhile we are at it: what language is HN written in?
- krapp 10y agoArc. [0]http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
- retube 10y agoI believe it is Arc, a lisp dialect that Paul Graham developed http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
- hakanderyal 10y agoIIRC, 2 servers - 1 production, 1 standby, running FreeBSD. Detailed specs have been written before, try searching.
- dang 10y agoIt's (edit: almost) the same since Nick posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006.
- r2dnb 10y agoThanks a lot
- yousifa 10y agowhat is the connection it is being served on?
- pbreit 10y agoI'd be curious what AWS/DigitalOcean setup would be able to run HN. Any educated guesses?
- technion 10y agoPlaying around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM. Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about. The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like database snapshots, onto S3. Those costs are still nothing to sneeze at, and very likely suboptimal.
- brudgers 10y ago3 months ago traffic was about 3 million page views per day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315525
- goldenkey 10y agoIt just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That machine can be built for less than 5k.
- mbrock 10y agoI'm curious about the total byte size of all HN content.
- lukeHeuer 10y agoThe mirror I keep of all HN items (posts, comments, jobs, polls, etc.) in JSON format is at 5.32GB uncompressed.
- mbrock 10y agoCool! Did you mirror everything from the API? Does it go back to the first test posts or whatever? :)
- lukeHeuer 10y agoYeah, it came from the API which goes back to item id 1. It's all here if you are interested: http://silo.lukeheuer.com/mirrors/news.ycombinator.com/ http://silo.lukeheuer.com/mirrors/news.ycombinator.com/ Post items are organized by month so you can check out the byte size progression over HN's lifespan.