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> My cluster is small - I have <100 machines at peak Let me ask: WTF are people are doing that <100 machines is a "small cluster"? I ran a Top 100 (as measured

by chx 10y ago

> My cluster is small - I have <100 machines at peak Let me ask: WTF are people are doing that <100 machines is a "small cluster"? I ran a Top 100 (as measured by Quantcast) website with 23 machines and that included kit and caboodle -- Dev, Staging and Production environments. And quite some of that were just for HA purposes not because we needed that much... Stackexchange also runs about two dozen servers. Yes, yes, Google, Facebook runs datacenters but there's a power law kind of distribution here and the iron needs are falling very, very fast as you move from say Top 1 website to Top 30.

kozikow 10y ago
I have a processing pipeline that does crawling, indexing and some analytics on the crawled data - I am building a vertical-focused search engine focused on catering for some specific kinds of companies. Usually my cluster is very small, unless the pipeline is in progress. At this very moment I am not doing any processing, so I only have 3 machines up.
brown9-2 10y ago
Not all computing use cases are running a website.
necubi 10y ago
The number of machines you need to run a service is not really a linear function of your traffic. If you have a mostly static website that can be heavily cached/cdn'd, you can easily scale to thousands of requests a second with a small server footprint. I expect that's true of many of the top 100 sites as measured by visitors (like Quantcast does). But if you need to store a lot of data, or need to look up data with very low latency, or do CPU-intensive work for every request, you will end up with a lot more servers. (The other thing to consider is that SaSS companies can easily deal with more traffic than even the largest web sites, because they tend to aggregate traffic from many websites; Quantcast, for example, where I used to work, got hundreds of thousands of requests per second to its measurement endpoint.)
- chx 10y ago
  Note: the site I mentioned did hit the database quite a few times for each page. It was a nice challenge.
tinco 10y ago
Not everyone can afford to vertically scale. Those 24 servers of StackExchange together cost more than the average 100 machine 'small' cluster. At Digital Ocean the performance sweetspot probably lies at the $20/mo machine, so that's 2000$/mo for a 100 machine cluster. You think StackExchange pays less than that for their hardware? Also, some sites are simply larger than StackExchange, and you never heard of them. There's a huge spectrum between StackExchange and Google.
- chx 10y ago
  There's some truth in that, the site I mentioned in 2010 was running DB servers with 144GB of RAM -- unlike SE we rented servers, the colo numbers didn't look good.

by chx 10y ago

kozikow 10y ago

I have a processing pipeline that does crawling, indexing and some analytics on the crawled data - I am building a vertical-focused search engine focused on catering for some specific kinds of companies. Usually my cluster is very small, unless the pipeline is in progress. At this very moment I am not doing any processing, so I only have 3 machines up.

brown9-2 10y ago

Not all computing use cases are running a website.

necubi 10y ago

The number of machines you need to run a service is not really a linear function of your traffic. If you have a mostly static website that can be heavily cached/cdn'd, you can easily scale to thousands of requests a second with a small server footprint. I expect that's true of many of the top 100 sites as measured by visitors (like Quantcast does). But if you need to store a lot of data, or need to look up data with very low latency, or do CPU-intensive work for every request, you will end up with a lot more servers. (The other thing to consider is that SaSS companies can easily deal with more traffic than even the largest web sites, because they tend to aggregate traffic from many websites; Quantcast, for example, where I used to work, got hundreds of thousands of requests per second to its measurement endpoint.)

chx 10y ago
Note: the site I mentioned did hit the database quite a few times for each page. It was a nice challenge.

tinco 10y ago

Not everyone can afford to vertically scale. Those 24 servers of StackExchange together cost more than the average 100 machine 'small' cluster. At Digital Ocean the performance sweetspot probably lies at the $20/mo machine, so that's 2000$/mo for a 100 machine cluster. You think StackExchange pays less than that for their hardware? Also, some sites are simply larger than StackExchange, and you never heard of them. There's a huge spectrum between StackExchange and Google.

chx 10y ago
There's some truth in that, the site I mentioned in 2010 was running DB servers with 144GB of RAM -- unlike SE we rented servers, the colo numbers didn't look good.