3 ms·

As much as I enjoy the Raspberry Pi, I doubt if it could handle the traffic or if it would last long with the limited write cycles of an SDcard.

DSMan195276 10y ago
You could put the site itself on an external drive via USB - and ideally most of it the access be read-only for a static site, so the life of the sdcard shouldn't be as big of a concern. That said I'd agree, Raspberry Pi's a great but not quite fast enough for serving a high-traffic website.
lucb1e 10y ago
I know someone who optimized searching the leaked Adobe database (of a few hundred gigabytes if I remember correctly) on a Pi to a sub-second search. That was super impressive and the method used wasn't even obscure (binary search). The same doesn't apply here, but I'm trying to say a Pi isn't entirely worthless. For example, what pages get accessed the most anyway? I'm guessing the latest source code and maybe the latest release, though most people probably just apt-get git instead so it's probably mostly the source code. Then there are man pages and some other info pages, if I remember correctly. Sounds like the latest release + 90% of those text pages can easily fit in RAM. So memcached? Nah, the Linux kernel happily caches the files that you read from disk. I don't know the actual numbers but it doesn't sound infeasible to me. A $230 hosting bill is very heavy though, I guess you'd need some serious fiber as well to provide the uplink. But again, without numbers it's all "maybe" and "probably".
- superice 10y ago
  Yeah, that was my project, it worked quite nicely. However, the biggest reason was that my Raspberry Pi was my only server at that point, and besides, tranferring 10GB out of my home connection to a VPS would've been too slow for my impatient self. I think the file was stripped of all other data (which brought it down to about 4GB) and I put it on a thumb drive instead. Nowadays I would have used a VPS for that. The point with S3 or any other cloud solution is that they make sure you're up and running. Even though it might still be useful, the need for good service monitoring is as good as gone when moving to one of these cloud based platforms. And then I'm not even taking into account the time you have to invest in setting up and configuring a RPi properly vs just pushing a repo to Github Pages, or uploading a zip file to S3. Heroku or other cloud platforms can be crazy expensive, but for static file hosting, S3 or Github Pages is more than enough and quite affordable.
pricechild 10y ago
Raspberrypi.org hosted the entire site using raspberry pi's for a while. I've just checked and it looks like they nolonger do so though... $ curl -I https://www.raspberrypi.org 2>/dev/null | grep X-Served-By X-Served-By: Blog VM 2 Fun while it lasted!

DSMan195276 10y ago

You could put the site itself on an external drive via USB - and ideally most of it the access be read-only for a static site, so the life of the sdcard shouldn't be as big of a concern. That said I'd agree, Raspberry Pi's a great but not quite fast enough for serving a high-traffic website.

lucb1e 10y ago

I know someone who optimized searching the leaked Adobe database (of a few hundred gigabytes if I remember correctly) on a Pi to a sub-second search. That was super impressive and the method used wasn't even obscure (binary search). The same doesn't apply here, but I'm trying to say a Pi isn't entirely worthless. For example, what pages get accessed the most anyway? I'm guessing the latest source code and maybe the latest release, though most people probably just apt-get git instead so it's probably mostly the source code. Then there are man pages and some other info pages, if I remember correctly. Sounds like the latest release + 90% of those text pages can easily fit in RAM. So memcached? Nah, the Linux kernel happily caches the files that you read from disk. I don't know the actual numbers but it doesn't sound infeasible to me. A $230 hosting bill is very heavy though, I guess you'd need some serious fiber as well to provide the uplink. But again, without numbers it's all "maybe" and "probably".

superice 10y ago
Yeah, that was my project, it worked quite nicely. However, the biggest reason was that my Raspberry Pi was my only server at that point, and besides, tranferring 10GB out of my home connection to a VPS would've been too slow for my impatient self. I think the file was stripped of all other data (which brought it down to about 4GB) and I put it on a thumb drive instead. Nowadays I would have used a VPS for that. The point with S3 or any other cloud solution is that they make sure you're up and running. Even though it might still be useful, the need for good service monitoring is as good as gone when moving to one of these cloud based platforms. And then I'm not even taking into account the time you have to invest in setting up and configuring a RPi properly vs just pushing a repo to Github Pages, or uploading a zip file to S3. Heroku or other cloud platforms can be crazy expensive, but for static file hosting, S3 or Github Pages is more than enough and quite affordable.

pricechild 10y ago

Raspberrypi.org hosted the entire site using raspberry pi's for a while. I've just checked and it looks like they nolonger do so though... $ curl -I https://www.raspberrypi.org 2>/dev/null | grep X-Served-By X-Served-By: Blog VM 2 Fun while it lasted!