4 ms·

Down because too much traffic ... Completely tangential rant: I just saw a tweet of a guy serving 200k connections on a $5 USD instance. I believe it because

Down because too much traffic ... Completely tangential rant: I just saw a tweet of a guy serving 200k connections on a $5 USD instance. I believe it because I've experienced it first hand several times. Serving static pages in 2021 is not a big deal, at all. On the other hand, this is anandtech, a huge site that's been going on for years (decades?). For sure they get a lot of traffic, but I doubt they get something like 1M+ simultaneous requests per second. Can't they just solve this problem already? Whoever is in charge of their tech stack is hardly doing its job, this is unexcusable.

zitterbewegung 5y ago
Maybe they should use in some kind of caching service like Cloudflare?
- defaulty 5y ago
  They could; or they could just generate static pages and serve from a nginx reverse proxy rather than fetching from databases, etc. The price is very different The NY Times does this for election day results because they fully expect that to get hit hard. They re-publish a static page every few minutes
  - erk__ 5y ago
    Same reason you can sometimes view hacker news without being logged in when it is seemingly down
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Maybe they should hire IBM to invent a virtual L5 cache for the website and "magically" move it all into our L2s for "government-authorized nuclear bunker" level service.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    Maybe they DID hire IBM and made all those things and still, after some years and a couple million dollars, the platform delivered can't handle more than 1,000 or so visitors.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Story time: in the early 2010, Oracle managed to sell two (yes, one for redundancy obviously) enormous mainframes to the French Civil Aviation Authority (DGAC) just to host their Intranet portal. I don't remember how much each costed exactly, but IIRC it was a six digit figure. And the funniest part of that story: the mainframes where so heavy they couldn't fit the existing server room, so they were parked for months in a warehouse, unplugged, waiting for some new dedicated server room to be built. (I don't know if the said server was eventually built or not, and if the mainframes were actually used or not in the end).
      - reacharavindh 5y ago
        Oh oh I got one. I visited the “server room” of the organisation responsible for e-healthcare(the software application that was in use by all public hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies in one state of India) as a consultant to learn the following. Their server room is in an old repurposed residential building on the second floor! The only ways to get there were either through narrow winding steps, or an ancient metal elevator that creaks and is also made for tiny humans. IBM managed to sell two Mainframes(Z10) to run their Java apps. The mainframes could not be brought in because of the elevator problem. I kid you not, they brought welders on site to dismantle the racks, and then weld them back again inside the “server room”! Cooling for the “server room” with two mainframes you ask? A few airconditioners that you’d typically installed at home and a table fan(I don’t know why it was there). They were concerned about performance issues on their Java applications which were simply “JVM runs out of memory about every day”. I luckily could bail out of that nightmare and escaped the whole situation. I could only think about the govt employees who were in charge of purchasing that got to go on fancy vacations paid for by IBM. I obviously don’t know if it’s the case, but my own amusing speculation to explain the irrational purchase.
ksec 5y ago
Well it wasn't down for me. But even it was really down it wont be their first time with capacity problem. Unlike ServeTheHome where they host and even assemble their own Server, I think Anandtech's team are now simply a content writer with Future Publishing handling everything on the hosting and software side along with Ads. But yes I think there is something very wrong with current trend of Web Development.
- sirmike_ 5y ago
  Anand hasnt had Anand for a very long time you are right to point out. We had it really good when he was in charge. In depth technical dives from a curious position. https://imgur.com/a/MFAypUc https://imgur.com/a/MFAypUc I believe Phronix is still good. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home ArsTechnica has waned and waxed over time. But they have always been solid-enough for me. They have always been up to defend the individual in technology policy and how trends in law enforcement deceptively catches up. They can get squirrelly with the climate view once in a while. BUT even if you disagree with them -- you can bet if you sincerely read their content they stance is well grounded. As a stable and long term aggregator for open source and similar news and articles I have been very happy with lxer. http://lxer.com/ http://lxer.com/
  - IanCutress 5y ago
    What? He was talking about site layout and uptime, not content.
- IanCutress 5y ago
  'I think Anandtech's team are now simply a content writer with Future Publishing handling everything on the hosting and software side along with Ads.' We're not an independent site anymore, so we have little control over how the site works and integrates into Future's back end (to be fair, compared to TH, we're not that integrated several years later because of a custom CMS and hosting setup, but it means Future won't put any $$$ into it until we transfer over). Simply put, with the big publishers, writers are writers, publishers deal with the publishing.
bArray 5y ago
> Completely tangential rant: I know we're not supposed to entertain this on HN, I think this would make a good 'Ask HN' - let me know if you make one. > I just saw a tweet of a guy serving 200k connections on a $5 USD instance. I believe it because I've experienced it first hand several times. Serving static pages in 2021 is not a big deal, at all. You can do that on a $1/month instance if you are clever about it. It's all about static serving. Heavy load is something that can be detected and handled - if you're maxing out your CPU/network, switch to low-res/quality images, minimal CSS and do away with comments/recommendations. You could get that page down to 20kB and be mostly the same. > Can't they just solve this problem already? Whoever is in charge of their tech stack is hardly doing its job, this is unexcusable. A text+images news website should not be having this much trouble, it's embarrassing. That said, I'm sure there is something we do not understand - I would for sure like to speak with somebody from the site to understand it more.
IanCutress 5y ago
I'm looking at our traffic logs and don't see any downturn in traffic. Normally when we get an outage it's pretty obvious. Did you actually get an error, or was it just not loading?
- moralestapia 5y ago
  504 Gateway Timeout Several times over the course of like an hour. It was a mmesage from Cloudflare, saying that your site took a long time to reply.
kortilla 5y ago
Did you consider that you just wrote that big rant without checking if the site was actually down or if it was just you?

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Maybe they should use in some kind of caching service like Cloudflare?

defaulty 5y ago
They could; or they could just generate static pages and serve from a nginx reverse proxy rather than fetching from databases, etc. The price is very different The NY Times does this for election day results because they fully expect that to get hit hard. They re-publish a static page every few minutes
- erk__ 5y ago
  Same reason you can sometimes view hacker news without being logged in when it is seemingly down
nixpulvis 5y ago
Maybe they should hire IBM to invent a virtual L5 cache for the website and "magically" move it all into our L2s for "government-authorized nuclear bunker" level service.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Maybe they DID hire IBM and made all those things and still, after some years and a couple million dollars, the platform delivered can't handle more than 1,000 or so visitors.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Story time: in the early 2010, Oracle managed to sell two (yes, one for redundancy obviously) enormous mainframes to the French Civil Aviation Authority (DGAC) just to host their Intranet portal. I don't remember how much each costed exactly, but IIRC it was a six digit figure. And the funniest part of that story: the mainframes where so heavy they couldn't fit the existing server room, so they were parked for months in a warehouse, unplugged, waiting for some new dedicated server room to be built. (I don't know if the said server was eventually built or not, and if the mainframes were actually used or not in the end).
    - reacharavindh 5y ago
      Oh oh I got one. I visited the “server room” of the organisation responsible for e-healthcare(the software application that was in use by all public hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies in one state of India) as a consultant to learn the following. Their server room is in an old repurposed residential building on the second floor! The only ways to get there were either through narrow winding steps, or an ancient metal elevator that creaks and is also made for tiny humans. IBM managed to sell two Mainframes(Z10) to run their Java apps. The mainframes could not be brought in because of the elevator problem. I kid you not, they brought welders on site to dismantle the racks, and then weld them back again inside the “server room”! Cooling for the “server room” with two mainframes you ask? A few airconditioners that you’d typically installed at home and a table fan(I don’t know why it was there). They were concerned about performance issues on their Java applications which were simply “JVM runs out of memory about every day”. I luckily could bail out of that nightmare and escaped the whole situation. I could only think about the govt employees who were in charge of purchasing that got to go on fancy vacations paid for by IBM. I obviously don’t know if it’s the case, but my own amusing speculation to explain the irrational purchase.

ksec 5y ago

Well it wasn't down for me. But even it was really down it wont be their first time with capacity problem. Unlike ServeTheHome where they host and even assemble their own Server, I think Anandtech's team are now simply a content writer with Future Publishing handling everything on the hosting and software side along with Ads. But yes I think there is something very wrong with current trend of Web Development.

sirmike_ 5y ago
Anand hasnt had Anand for a very long time you are right to point out. We had it really good when he was in charge. In depth technical dives from a curious position. https://imgur.com/a/MFAypUc https://imgur.com/a/MFAypUc I believe Phronix is still good. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home ArsTechnica has waned and waxed over time. But they have always been solid-enough for me. They have always been up to defend the individual in technology policy and how trends in law enforcement deceptively catches up. They can get squirrelly with the climate view once in a while. BUT even if you disagree with them -- you can bet if you sincerely read their content they stance is well grounded. As a stable and long term aggregator for open source and similar news and articles I have been very happy with lxer. http://lxer.com/ http://lxer.com/
- IanCutress 5y ago
  What? He was talking about site layout and uptime, not content.
IanCutress 5y ago
'I think Anandtech's team are now simply a content writer with Future Publishing handling everything on the hosting and software side along with Ads.' We're not an independent site anymore, so we have little control over how the site works and integrates into Future's back end (to be fair, compared to TH, we're not that integrated several years later because of a custom CMS and hosting setup, but it means Future won't put any $$$ into it until we transfer over). Simply put, with the big publishers, writers are writers, publishers deal with the publishing.

bArray 5y ago

> Completely tangential rant: I know we're not supposed to entertain this on HN, I think this would make a good 'Ask HN' - let me know if you make one. > I just saw a tweet of a guy serving 200k connections on a $5 USD instance. I believe it because I've experienced it first hand several times. Serving static pages in 2021 is not a big deal, at all. You can do that on a $1/month instance if you are clever about it. It's all about static serving. Heavy load is something that can be detected and handled - if you're maxing out your CPU/network, switch to low-res/quality images, minimal CSS and do away with comments/recommendations. You could get that page down to 20kB and be mostly the same. > Can't they just solve this problem already? Whoever is in charge of their tech stack is hardly doing its job, this is unexcusable. A text+images news website should not be having this much trouble, it's embarrassing. That said, I'm sure there is something we do not understand - I would for sure like to speak with somebody from the site to understand it more.

IanCutress 5y ago

I'm looking at our traffic logs and don't see any downturn in traffic. Normally when we get an outage it's pretty obvious. Did you actually get an error, or was it just not loading?

moralestapia 5y ago
504 Gateway Timeout Several times over the course of like an hour. It was a mmesage from Cloudflare, saying that your site took a long time to reply.

kortilla 5y ago

Did you consider that you just wrote that big rant without checking if the site was actually down or if it was just you?