8 ms·

HN is probably very small. Curious as to the minimum size of the backend that will hold up the website. There may need to be read replicas, but maybe not even

HN is probably very small. Curious as to the minimum size of the backend that will hold up the website. There may need to be read replicas, but maybe not even that is needed.

_joel 6y ago
They only have one server, iirc.
- voxadam 6y ago
  And, if I'm not mistaken, the site is single threaded.
aspectmin 6y ago
Would love to see the HN architecture.
- krapp 6y ago
  arclanguage.org hosts the current version of Arc Lisp, including an old version of the forum, but HN has made a lot of changes locally that they won't disclose for business reasons. There's an open source fork at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki, but it doesn't have any direct relationship with HN.
- mike_d 6y ago
  Single threaded LISP application running on a single machine. Ta-da.
  - dang 6y ago
    The application is multi-threaded. But it runs over a green-thread language runtime, which maps everything to one OS thread. That's a significant distinction because if you swap the underlying implementation then the same application should magically become multithreaded, which is exactly the plan.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dang 6y ago
It's about the same as what Scott described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 But we get around 6M requests a day now.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Maybe standby should be in another rack, perhaps even another datacenter.
  - dang 6y ago
    That would be the natural next step, but it's a question of whether it's worth the engineering and maintenance effort, especially compared to other things that need doing. For failures that don't take down the datacenter, we already have a hot standby. For datacenter failures, we can migrate to a different host (at least, we believe we can—it's been a while since we verified this). But it would take at least a few hours, and probably the inevitable glitches would make it take the better part of a day. Let's say a day. The question is whether the considerable effort to build and maintain a cross-datacenter standby, in order to prevent outages of a few hours like today's, would be a good investment of resources.
    - cesarb 6y ago
      > For failures that don't take down the datacenter, we already have a hot standby. For datacenter failures, we can migrate to a different host (at least, we believe we can—it's been a while since we verified this). It might be a good idea to verify it; see the recent events at OVH (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407323).
    - Aperocky 6y ago
      Question: what is the other things that need doing? Obviously does not apply to engineering effort outside of hacker news website, which the team might be working on. But this forum has seen little change over the years and it's pretty awesome as is. (Though I didn't use HN api too much so not sure what's going on that side).
brodock 6y ago
Funny they didn't had to build 10 million Microservices and host it through a million kubernetes pod instances to handle "internet traffic".

HN is probably very small. Curious as to the minimum size of the backend that will hold up the website. There may need to be read replicas, but maybe not even that is needed.

_joel 6y ago

They only have one server, iirc.

voxadam 6y ago
And, if I'm not mistaken, the site is single threaded.

aspectmin 6y ago

Would love to see the HN architecture.

krapp 6y ago
arclanguage.org hosts the current version of Arc Lisp, including an old version of the forum, but HN has made a lot of changes locally that they won't disclose for business reasons. There's an open source fork at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki, but it doesn't have any direct relationship with HN.
mike_d 6y ago
Single threaded LISP application running on a single machine. Ta-da.
- dang 6y ago
  The application is multi-threaded. But it runs over a green-thread language runtime, which maps everything to one OS thread. That's a significant distinction because if you swap the underlying implementation then the same application should magically become multithreaded, which is exactly the plan.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dang 6y ago

It's about the same as what Scott described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 But we get around 6M requests a day now.

bombcar 6y ago
Maybe standby should be in another rack, perhaps even another datacenter.
- dang 6y ago
  That would be the natural next step, but it's a question of whether it's worth the engineering and maintenance effort, especially compared to other things that need doing. For failures that don't take down the datacenter, we already have a hot standby. For datacenter failures, we can migrate to a different host (at least, we believe we can—it's been a while since we verified this). But it would take at least a few hours, and probably the inevitable glitches would make it take the better part of a day. Let's say a day. The question is whether the considerable effort to build and maintain a cross-datacenter standby, in order to prevent outages of a few hours like today's, would be a good investment of resources.
  - cesarb 6y ago
    > For failures that don't take down the datacenter, we already have a hot standby. For datacenter failures, we can migrate to a different host (at least, we believe we can—it's been a while since we verified this). It might be a good idea to verify it; see the recent events at OVH (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407323).
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Question: what is the other things that need doing? Obviously does not apply to engineering effort outside of hacker news website, which the team might be working on. But this forum has seen little change over the years and it's pretty awesome as is. (Though I didn't use HN api too much so not sure what's going on that side).

brodock 6y ago

Funny they didn't had to build 10 million Microservices and host it through a million kubernetes pod instances to handle "internet traffic".