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>Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. Spin up an apache installation and see how many req

by blhack 6y ago

>Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. Spin up an apache installation and see how many requests you can serve per second if you're just serving static files off of an SSD. It's a lot. edit: I see that there are already a bunch of other comments to this effect. I think you're comment is really going to bring out the old timers, haha. From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane.

ksec 6y ago
>I think you're comment is really going to bring out the old timers, haha. That is great ! :D >It's a lot. Well yes, but HN isn't really static though. Fairly Dynamics with Huge number of users and comments. But still, I think I need to rethink lots of assumption in terms of speed, scale and complexity.
- Izkata 6y ago
  There is some caching somewhere as well, probably provides a bit more boost. I've been at my work laptop (not logged in) and found something I wanted to reply to, so I pulled out my phone and did so. For a good 10 seconds afterwards, I could refresh my phone and see my comment, but refresh the laptop and not see it.
- arghwhat 6y ago
  Huge numbers of users don't really mean that much. Bandwidth is the main cost, but that's kept low by having a simple design. Serving the same content several times in a row requires very few resources - remember, reads far outnumber writes, so even dynamic comment pages will be served many times in between changes. 5.5 million page views a day is only 64 views a second, which isn't that hard to serve. As for the writes, as long as significant serialization is avoided, it is a non-issue. (The vast majority of websites could easily be designed to be as efficient.)
cmroanirgo 6y ago
>* From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane. * Agreed. I was brought up as a computer systems engineer... So, not a scientist, but I always worked with the basic premise of keep it simple. I've worked on projects where we built all the fangled clustering and master/slave (sorry to the PC crowd, but that's what it was called) stuff but never once needed it in practice. Our stuff could easily handle saturated gigabit networks as the 2 core cpu only running at 40%. We had cpu spare and could always add more network cards before we needed to split the server. It was less maintenance, for sure. It also had self healing so that some packets could be dropped if the client config allowed it, if the server decided it wanted to (but only ever did on the odd dodgey client connection) That said, I was always impressed by the map-reduce of for search results (yes, I know they've moved on) which showed how massive systems can be fast too. It seemed that the rest of the world wanted to become like Google, and the complexity grew for the std software shop, when it didn't need to imho. I jumped ship at that point and went embedded, which was a whole lot more fun for me. Sincerely, old timer
- katbyte 6y ago
  > master/slave That is what it _was_ called, it doesn’t have to be going forward.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    How about we spend our energy fixing systemic/institutional racism first, because language will follow quite naturally. The other way around surely doesn't work, and is just symbolic gestures without actual change.
    - katbyte 6y ago
      There is only so much i can do - i'm not american and thats a change i can't make on my own aside from doing my best to be an ally when possible. However i can open a few PRs and use some of my time to make that change. It's a minor inconvenience to me and if it makes even one black person feel heard and supported then yea, i'm gonna do it.
outworlder 6y ago
> From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane. You know, it should be even better than it was in the past, because a lot of heavy lifting is now done on the client. If we properly optimized our stuff, we could potentially request tiny pieces of information from servers, as opposed to rendering the whole thing. Kinda like native apps can do(if the backend protocols are not too bloated)

by blhack 6y ago

ksec 6y ago

>I think you're comment is really going to bring out the old timers, haha. That is great ! :D >It's a lot. Well yes, but HN isn't really static though. Fairly Dynamics with Huge number of users and comments. But still, I think I need to rethink lots of assumption in terms of speed, scale and complexity.

Izkata 6y ago
There is some caching somewhere as well, probably provides a bit more boost. I've been at my work laptop (not logged in) and found something I wanted to reply to, so I pulled out my phone and did so. For a good 10 seconds afterwards, I could refresh my phone and see my comment, but refresh the laptop and not see it.
arghwhat 6y ago
Huge numbers of users don't really mean that much. Bandwidth is the main cost, but that's kept low by having a simple design. Serving the same content several times in a row requires very few resources - remember, reads far outnumber writes, so even dynamic comment pages will be served many times in between changes. 5.5 million page views a day is only 64 views a second, which isn't that hard to serve. As for the writes, as long as significant serialization is avoided, it is a non-issue. (The vast majority of websites could easily be designed to be as efficient.)

cmroanirgo 6y ago

>* From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane. * Agreed. I was brought up as a computer systems engineer... So, not a scientist, but I always worked with the basic premise of keep it simple. I've worked on projects where we built all the fangled clustering and master/slave (sorry to the PC crowd, but that's what it was called) stuff but never once needed it in practice. Our stuff could easily handle saturated gigabit networks as the 2 core cpu only running at 40%. We had cpu spare and could always add more network cards before we needed to split the server. It was less maintenance, for sure. It also had self healing so that some packets could be dropped if the client config allowed it, if the server decided it wanted to (but only ever did on the odd dodgey client connection) That said, I was always impressed by the map-reduce of for search results (yes, I know they've moved on) which showed how massive systems can be fast too. It seemed that the rest of the world wanted to become like Google, and the complexity grew for the std software shop, when it didn't need to imho. I jumped ship at that point and went embedded, which was a whole lot more fun for me. Sincerely, old timer

katbyte 6y ago
> master/slave That is what it _was_ called, it doesn’t have to be going forward.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  How about we spend our energy fixing systemic/institutional racism first, because language will follow quite naturally. The other way around surely doesn't work, and is just symbolic gestures without actual change.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    There is only so much i can do - i'm not american and thats a change i can't make on my own aside from doing my best to be an ally when possible. However i can open a few PRs and use some of my time to make that change. It's a minor inconvenience to me and if it makes even one black person feel heard and supported then yea, i'm gonna do it.

outworlder 6y ago

> From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane. You know, it should be even better than it was in the past, because a lot of heavy lifting is now done on the client. If we properly optimized our stuff, we could potentially request tiny pieces of information from servers, as opposed to rendering the whole thing. Kinda like native apps can do(if the backend protocols are not too bloated)