6 ms·

Saying it's online is misleading. It's just a static landing page.

by Axsuul 6y ago

rodgerd 6y ago
Yeah, https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 shows the hardware they've been asking vendors to provide. I've never run a high-volume social media site, but I have to say that 70-100 DB servers each with 4 TB of storage and 96 GB feels like a bit much. (On edit: Corey Quinn estimates it as half a million a month on AWS.)
- devwastaken 6y ago
  They're probably intending on selling their own services as an AWS replacement for people whom are 'censored'.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  This seems extreme especially if they're going for bare-metal. Even a single one of these DB servers would handle a lot of traffic if they're bare-metal. When it comes to running Postgres on 70-100 servers I'm also not sure, unless they're doing some sharding at the application level, I'd expect the overheads of replication and resulting network traffic to be insane if they're merely replicating across all of them. Their whole website should be able to run on a handful of these machines; their main cost and resource usage would be hosting & converting uploaded media, not the DB of app servers.
  - Corrado 6y ago
    Maybe they are trying to bring up multiple sites (ie. AWS regions) for redundancy. If you have 10 "regions" then maybe hardware requirements look a bit more reasonable (7-10 DB servers each, etc.)
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Is needing servers with 96 vCPU's and 768 GB of RAM each...normal? I'm a programmer, but I do mobile dev, and that amount of resources for a single machine sounds comically high to me. I thought modern websites usually had more 'normally' specced servers and just distributed the load across a ton of them?
  - sgk284 6y ago
    These requirements are insane. By comparison, Stack Overflow had 25 servers in 2016 [1]: - 2 database servers (with half that RAM and 24 cores each) - 2 redis servers - 3 elasticsearch servers - 11 web servers - 4 load balancers - 3 service workers [1]https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
    - AareyBaba 6y ago
      Can anyone recommend a Coursera/EdX or other online resource that goes over the basics of designing and setting up such kinds of high-performance server systems ?
      - zamalek 6y ago
        I honestly don't think you'll find a course that covers this. The SO devs (and others) have kept a blog going for years with the type of information you're after. The search term is "mechanical sympathy." Language/framework also matters. You're not going to pull this off with a backend based on a framework that gives no damns about performance. Rust, C# (bleeding edge), Java and C come to mind as good candidates.
    - kgantchev 6y ago
      SO doesn't have the content requirements of a modern Social Network: images, video, and streaming are huge factors. Especially with modern smartphone capabilities.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I remember reading a few days ago that their code was atrocious. Perhaps this is an extreme example of the costs of never refactoring? I can believe that the cost of spaghetti code compounds quickly.
    - Exmoor 6y ago
      I can believe that the company who named resources sequentially, enforced no security validation for viewing posts/media, and didn't strip metadata from media uploads also didn't have engineers especially skilled in optimization.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Seems like a lot. I remember Stackoverflow posting their hardware setup in 2016 IIRC and it was just a handful of servers compared to this.
  - rodgerd 6y ago
    Quite: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
- freedomben 6y ago
  I'm guessing these aren't their current needs, but rather where they anticipate growing too. These numbers are insane, but the CEO of Parler is a former AWS employee, so I would guess he knows somewhat what he is doing.
  - albatruss 6y ago
    Former AWS employee after being employed for <3 months.
- histriosum 6y ago
  Holy wow.. To me, this looks like the contents of an RFP where the submitter doesn't actually want any vendor to be able to meet the requirements.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I wonder if it is for the anti-trust lawsuit. Claim that nobody else can provide what they need?
    - skeeter2020 6y ago
      This seems like a good guess
      - systematical 6y ago
        But wouldn't that be easily thrown out / defeated if they weren't consuming those resources on AWS? Which seems easy to prove in court...
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        That didn't stop any of the election lawsuits.
        edoceo 6y ago
        Yes it did, they stopped. They started, were clearly bullshit, and then died in the courts - exactly as the system intended.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      It wouldn't matter for the anti-trust lawsuit, since they're alleging that Amazon conspired with Twitter to kick off Parler because Parler would steal Twitter's market share. (Well, trying to allege, because they don't even manage to allege that any further than "Amazon hosts Twitter" and implying there's no other reason Amazon would kick Parler off, despite spending half the brief complaining that they're being kicked off for being conservative.)
- Spivak 6y ago
  This is an absolutely bonkers amount of resources for the functionality and audience they have. We got our first 5 million users on 4 used PowerEdge nodes and our first 30 million with 2 bare-metal DB servers. Good god what is Parler doing?
  - fma 6y ago
    Seeing how their software is very far from being secure...it's probably very far from optimized, too.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      They're running Wordpress, which is famous for scaling badly to the extent that there are large companies like WPEngine.com devoted to doing nothing except working around that.
      - Hamuko 6y ago
        How and why would you run a social network in Wordpress?
        tiborsaas 6y ago
        I'd guess that they hired any programmer they could find to do some PoC work (who made a horrible choice) then the rest is sunken cost fallacy.
        cbg0 6y ago
        A lot of people like the back-end admin panel of WordPress and its WYSIWYG feature, so a bunch of other people have created a lot of themes/mods/plugins around WP because of that. If you run a small website it's all fine, otherwise you have to deal with performance issues and WP limitations because you've decided to build a social network on top of a blogging engine.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  They erroneously hosted their free speech site on AWS. Smart people are not employed by the company.
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  The reason is that they're running their social media site using Wordpress (of all things, why?!?!?!), so it's probable that it will scale horrendously. The data breach happend with Parler was allegedly due to an exploit in one of the Wordpress plugins.
dang 6y ago
Ok, we've replaced website with home page in the title above.

Saying it's online is misleading. It's just a static landing page.

by Axsuul 6y ago

Saying it's online is misleading. It's just a static landing page.

Yeah, https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 shows the hardware they've been asking vendors to provide. I've never run a high-volume social media site, but I have to say that 70-100 DB servers each with 4 TB of storage and 96 GB feels like a bit much. (On edit: Corey Quinn estimates it as half a million a month on AWS.)

devwastaken 6y ago
They're probably intending on selling their own services as an AWS replacement for people whom are 'censored'.
Nextgrid 6y ago
This seems extreme especially if they're going for bare-metal. Even a single one of these DB servers would handle a lot of traffic if they're bare-metal. When it comes to running Postgres on 70-100 servers I'm also not sure, unless they're doing some sharding at the application level, I'd expect the overheads of replication and resulting network traffic to be insane if they're merely replicating across all of them. Their whole website should be able to run on a handful of these machines; their main cost and resource usage would be hosting & converting uploaded media, not the DB of app servers.
- Corrado 6y ago
  Maybe they are trying to bring up multiple sites (ie. AWS regions) for redundancy. If you have 10 "regions" then maybe hardware requirements look a bit more reasonable (7-10 DB servers each, etc.)
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Is needing servers with 96 vCPU's and 768 GB of RAM each...normal? I'm a programmer, but I do mobile dev, and that amount of resources for a single machine sounds comically high to me. I thought modern websites usually had more 'normally' specced servers and just distributed the load across a ton of them?
- sgk284 6y ago
  These requirements are insane. By comparison, Stack Overflow had 25 servers in 2016 [1]: - 2 database servers (with half that RAM and 24 cores each) - 2 redis servers - 3 elasticsearch servers - 11 web servers - 4 load balancers - 3 service workers [1]https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
  - AareyBaba 6y ago
    Can anyone recommend a Coursera/EdX or other online resource that goes over the basics of designing and setting up such kinds of high-performance server systems ?
    - zamalek 6y ago
      I honestly don't think you'll find a course that covers this. The SO devs (and others) have kept a blog going for years with the type of information you're after. The search term is "mechanical sympathy." Language/framework also matters. You're not going to pull this off with a backend based on a framework that gives no damns about performance. Rust, C# (bleeding edge), Java and C come to mind as good candidates.
  - kgantchev 6y ago
    SO doesn't have the content requirements of a modern Social Network: images, video, and streaming are huge factors. Especially with modern smartphone capabilities.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I remember reading a few days ago that their code was atrocious. Perhaps this is an extreme example of the costs of never refactoring? I can believe that the cost of spaghetti code compounds quickly.
  - Exmoor 6y ago
    I can believe that the company who named resources sequentially, enforced no security validation for viewing posts/media, and didn't strip metadata from media uploads also didn't have engineers especially skilled in optimization.
Barrin92 6y ago
Seems like a lot. I remember Stackoverflow posting their hardware setup in 2016 IIRC and it was just a handful of servers compared to this.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Quite: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
freedomben 6y ago
I'm guessing these aren't their current needs, but rather where they anticipate growing too. These numbers are insane, but the CEO of Parler is a former AWS employee, so I would guess he knows somewhat what he is doing.
- albatruss 6y ago
  Former AWS employee after being employed for <3 months.
histriosum 6y ago
Holy wow.. To me, this looks like the contents of an RFP where the submitter doesn't actually want any vendor to be able to meet the requirements.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I wonder if it is for the anti-trust lawsuit. Claim that nobody else can provide what they need?
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    This seems like a good guess
    - systematical 6y ago
      But wouldn't that be easily thrown out / defeated if they weren't consuming those resources on AWS? Which seems easy to prove in court...
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        That didn't stop any of the election lawsuits.
        edoceo 6y ago
        Yes it did, they stopped. They started, were clearly bullshit, and then died in the courts - exactly as the system intended.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    It wouldn't matter for the anti-trust lawsuit, since they're alleging that Amazon conspired with Twitter to kick off Parler because Parler would steal Twitter's market share. (Well, trying to allege, because they don't even manage to allege that any further than "Amazon hosts Twitter" and implying there's no other reason Amazon would kick Parler off, despite spending half the brief complaining that they're being kicked off for being conservative.)
Spivak 6y ago
This is an absolutely bonkers amount of resources for the functionality and audience they have. We got our first 5 million users on 4 used PowerEdge nodes and our first 30 million with 2 bare-metal DB servers. Good god what is Parler doing?
- fma 6y ago
  Seeing how their software is very far from being secure...it's probably very far from optimized, too.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    They're running Wordpress, which is famous for scaling badly to the extent that there are large companies like WPEngine.com devoted to doing nothing except working around that.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      How and why would you run a social network in Wordpress?
      - tiborsaas 6y ago
        I'd guess that they hired any programmer they could find to do some PoC work (who made a horrible choice) then the rest is sunken cost fallacy.
      - cbg0 6y ago
        A lot of people like the back-end admin panel of WordPress and its WYSIWYG feature, so a bunch of other people have created a lot of themes/mods/plugins around WP because of that. If you run a small website it's all fine, otherwise you have to deal with performance issues and WP limitations because you've decided to build a social network on top of a blogging engine.
ketamine__ 6y ago
They erroneously hosted their free speech site on AWS. Smart people are not employed by the company.
lasagnaphil 6y ago
The reason is that they're running their social media site using Wordpress (of all things, why?!?!?!), so it's probable that it will scale horrendously. The data breach happend with Parler was allegedly due to an exploit in one of the Wordpress plugins.

dang 6y ago

Ok, we've replaced website with home page in the title above.