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Here's some anecdata from someone serving 1.5 million monthly users with a realtime (chat etc.) web app. Disregarding the file serving functionality, this is th

Here's some anecdata from someone serving 1.5 million monthly users with a realtime (chat etc.) web app. Disregarding the file serving functionality, this is the entire infrastructure: - The frontend is running on a 30 bucks/mo VPS with cycles and RAM to spare. - There's 2 DB servers for 5 bucks / mo for redundancy. This thing would scale pretty linearly in theory, so for 10 million users just add like 4 servers. So about 200 bucks / mo to run your average startup's web app at 10 mil users. Alternatively write bad software and throw 50k/mo at AWS I guess.

maxxxxx 8y ago
It always amazes me how much load servers can take these days. I guess the only thing you couldn't handle well would be large spikes in demand.
- chmod775 8y ago
  There was some spikes that brought the site down. A notable one was when I submitted the site to HN back when that kind of traffic was still a lot. You learn something each time...
komali2 8y ago
Do you have more details? How did you write your app in such a way that isn't "bad?"
- chmod775 8y ago
  It's a node app that tries to keep things simple, i.e. no big frameworks. I put thought into performance as well and it has seen a significant number of re-writes. I didn't just get there from nothing. The project is about 6 years old. Edit: I should add that I ran into performance hurdles now and then, causing me to upgrade to more expensive hardware until I had resolved them. It was mostly memory leaks or inefficient IO/websockets. Nothing took longer than a week to fix so far though.
aicioara 8y ago
Curious about the $2.5/mo database deal. What is that service?
- chmod775 8y ago
  It's $5 per VPS, each just running a redis database. One is with OVH, the other is with ip-projects.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
stygiansonic 8y ago
What’s the typical QPS like?
- Thaxll 8y ago
  It was probably pretty low.
- chmod775 8y ago
  Since it's essentially an one-page app I can do a lot via persistent websocket connections (of which there are usually ~25k concurrently).

maxxxxx 8y ago

It always amazes me how much load servers can take these days. I guess the only thing you couldn't handle well would be large spikes in demand.

chmod775 8y ago
There was some spikes that brought the site down. A notable one was when I submitted the site to HN back when that kind of traffic was still a lot. You learn something each time...

komali2 8y ago

Do you have more details? How did you write your app in such a way that isn't "bad?"

chmod775 8y ago
It's a node app that tries to keep things simple, i.e. no big frameworks. I put thought into performance as well and it has seen a significant number of re-writes. I didn't just get there from nothing. The project is about 6 years old. Edit: I should add that I ran into performance hurdles now and then, causing me to upgrade to more expensive hardware until I had resolved them. It was mostly memory leaks or inefficient IO/websockets. Nothing took longer than a week to fix so far though.

aicioara 8y ago

Curious about the $2.5/mo database deal. What is that service?

chmod775 8y ago
It's $5 per VPS, each just running a redis database. One is with OVH, the other is with ip-projects.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

stygiansonic 8y ago

What’s the typical QPS like?

Thaxll 8y ago
It was probably pretty low.
chmod775 8y ago
Since it's essentially an one-page app I can do a lot via persistent websocket connections (of which there are usually ~25k concurrently).