6 ms·

I don't understand. Why is 2k requests/sec supposed to be massive? Try this yourself: write a simple web server in Go, host it on a cheap VPS provider, let's s

by hsn915 5y ago

I don't understand. Why is 2k requests/sec supposed to be massive? Try this yourself: write a simple web server in Go, host it on a cheap VPS provider, let's say at the option that costs $20/mo. Your website will be able to handle more than 1k/s requests with hardly any resource usage. ok, let's assume you're doing some complicated things. So what? You can scale vertically, upgrade to the $120/mo server. Your website now should be able to comfortably handle 5k req/s Looking at the website itself, mangadex.org, it doesn't even host the manga itself. The whole website is just an index that links to manga on external websites. All you are doing is storing metadata and displaying it as a webpage. The easiest problem on the web. So, I really don't understand the premise behind the whole post. The problem statement is: > In practice, we currently see peaks of above 2000 requests every single second during prime time. This is great in terms of success as a website, but it's underwhelming in terms of describing a technical problem.

colesantiago 5y ago
I agree, just had to read the article again, and took it as a fancy way of wasting money really.
AviKav 5y ago
The only releases that link to external websites are the ones from sites such as MangaPlus and BiliBili (And delayed releases if you count those)
Tenoke 5y ago
>Looking at the website itself, mangadex.org, it doesn't even host the manga itself. They do seem to. Clicking on a random manga on there the images are hosted on their server[0]. Also I guess some of those are much bigger images which is less trivial to serve at that rate than a 10kb static page. 0. blob:https://mangadex.org/e78bd61a-e761-4a73-a27c-5f58394e7ea4 https://mangadex.org/e78bd61a-e761-4a73-a27c-5f58394e7ea4
- akx 5y ago
  Blob links are scoped to your browser tab, they're not real internet URLs.
tristan9 5y ago
> This is great in terms of success as a website, but it's underwhelming in terms of describing a technical problem. A bit of an intro punchline, even though I agree it admittedly doesn't say much on itself :) Fwiw most of the work is that there's little "static" traffic going on -- images and cacheable responses are not very CPU intensive to serve -- but what isn't static (which is a good chunk of it) is more problematic, but more to come on these
slightwinder 5y ago
You ignore the weight of requests and general situation of this project. This is not your average mommy-blog whose does not care much how many downtimes it has. This is a website with illegal content, under constant attack, with a some pretty dynamic content on top and likely the main goal to satisfy their community. So most of their budget will go to security and redundancy, to protect themselves and allowing a high uptime. Where you can use 1 server, they will need to have something around 20 servers. Where you can use a cheap VPS provider, they must use an expensive shady provider who will take the heat of legal attacks. And so on and on... because of their situation they have a bunch more requirements which eat their budget than your average website, leading to a rather heavy, complex and thus expensive architecture. Surely there is still room for optimization, but it seems this is a rather new redesign from scratch(?), so not details need time.
true_religion 5y ago
They also host the manga. It’s not just an link farm. Because they host… that’s why they use ceph. Their goal is for scanlators to have a place to post their new translated manga, rather than always linking it off from some Wordpress instance.
ctvo 5y ago
> Try this yourself: write a simple web server in Go, host it on a cheap VPS provider, let's say at the option that costs $20/mo. Your website will be able to handle more than 1k/s requests with hardly any resource usage. These people have never heard of Go, obviously. The likely scenario is not that you haven't fully understood their constraints or requirements, it's that you're just smarter than they are. > So what? You can scale vertically, upgrade to the $120/mo server. Your website now should be able to comfortably handle 5k req/s > Looking at the website itself, mangadex.org, it doesn't even host the manga itself. The whole website is just an index that links to manga on external websites. All you are doing is storing metadata and displaying it as a webpage. The easiest problem on the web. Take that order of magnitude cheaper, single VPS server solution you're proposing and build something with it. Sounds like you'd make a lot of money. There has to be a business idea around "storing metadata and displaying it as a webpage" somewhere? Easiest problem on the web. The peanut gallery at HN is out of control. People who don't do / build explaining to the people who do how easy, simple, better their solutions would be.
- manigandham 5y ago
  There are plenty of people who build here on HN (more than most other sites) and the requirements are pretty clearly described in the article. While it's not as simple as a Go program on a VPS, there is certainly a lot of unnecessary overhead here. I think you underestimate just how much poor and wasteful engineering there is out there.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    > While it's not as simple as a Go program on a VPS, there is certainly a lot of unnecessary overhead here. I think you underestimate just how much poor and wasteful engineering there is out there. I don't under estimate poor and wasteful engineering at all, but that's not what I saw in the article. Serving traffic is a single element of their design. They also designed for security, redundancy, and observability. All with their own solutions because using a service or a cloud provider would be too costly. With that in mind, it's not a charitable view to think they didn't explore low hanging fruits like "make the server in Go". If you think you can do better, detail in depth how and solve all of their requirements vs. the single piece you're familiar with. And if you can do the above holistically, for an order of magnitude below their costs, it sounds like I need to get in touch to throw money at you.

by hsn915 5y ago

colesantiago 5y ago

I agree, just had to read the article again, and took it as a fancy way of wasting money really.

AviKav 5y ago

The only releases that link to external websites are the ones from sites such as MangaPlus and BiliBili (And delayed releases if you count those)

Tenoke 5y ago

>Looking at the website itself, mangadex.org, it doesn't even host the manga itself. They do seem to. Clicking on a random manga on there the images are hosted on their server[0]. Also I guess some of those are much bigger images which is less trivial to serve at that rate than a 10kb static page. 0. blob:https://mangadex.org/e78bd61a-e761-4a73-a27c-5f58394e7ea4 https://mangadex.org/e78bd61a-e761-4a73-a27c-5f58394e7ea4

akx 5y ago
Blob links are scoped to your browser tab, they're not real internet URLs.

tristan9 5y ago

> This is great in terms of success as a website, but it's underwhelming in terms of describing a technical problem. A bit of an intro punchline, even though I agree it admittedly doesn't say much on itself :) Fwiw most of the work is that there's little "static" traffic going on -- images and cacheable responses are not very CPU intensive to serve -- but what isn't static (which is a good chunk of it) is more problematic, but more to come on these

slightwinder 5y ago

You ignore the weight of requests and general situation of this project. This is not your average mommy-blog whose does not care much how many downtimes it has. This is a website with illegal content, under constant attack, with a some pretty dynamic content on top and likely the main goal to satisfy their community. So most of their budget will go to security and redundancy, to protect themselves and allowing a high uptime. Where you can use 1 server, they will need to have something around 20 servers. Where you can use a cheap VPS provider, they must use an expensive shady provider who will take the heat of legal attacks. And so on and on... because of their situation they have a bunch more requirements which eat their budget than your average website, leading to a rather heavy, complex and thus expensive architecture. Surely there is still room for optimization, but it seems this is a rather new redesign from scratch(?), so not details need time.

true_religion 5y ago

They also host the manga. It’s not just an link farm. Because they host… that’s why they use ceph. Their goal is for scanlators to have a place to post their new translated manga, rather than always linking it off from some Wordpress instance.

ctvo 5y ago

> Try this yourself: write a simple web server in Go, host it on a cheap VPS provider, let's say at the option that costs $20/mo. Your website will be able to handle more than 1k/s requests with hardly any resource usage. These people have never heard of Go, obviously. The likely scenario is not that you haven't fully understood their constraints or requirements, it's that you're just smarter than they are. > So what? You can scale vertically, upgrade to the $120/mo server. Your website now should be able to comfortably handle 5k req/s > Looking at the website itself, mangadex.org, it doesn't even host the manga itself. The whole website is just an index that links to manga on external websites. All you are doing is storing metadata and displaying it as a webpage. The easiest problem on the web. Take that order of magnitude cheaper, single VPS server solution you're proposing and build something with it. Sounds like you'd make a lot of money. There has to be a business idea around "storing metadata and displaying it as a webpage" somewhere? Easiest problem on the web. The peanut gallery at HN is out of control. People who don't do / build explaining to the people who do how easy, simple, better their solutions would be.

manigandham 5y ago
There are plenty of people who build here on HN (more than most other sites) and the requirements are pretty clearly described in the article. While it's not as simple as a Go program on a VPS, there is certainly a lot of unnecessary overhead here. I think you underestimate just how much poor and wasteful engineering there is out there.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > While it's not as simple as a Go program on a VPS, there is certainly a lot of unnecessary overhead here. I think you underestimate just how much poor and wasteful engineering there is out there. I don't under estimate poor and wasteful engineering at all, but that's not what I saw in the article. Serving traffic is a single element of their design. They also designed for security, redundancy, and observability. All with their own solutions because using a service or a cloud provider would be too costly. With that in mind, it's not a charitable view to think they didn't explore low hanging fruits like "make the server in Go". If you think you can do better, detail in depth how and solve all of their requirements vs. the single piece you're familiar with. And if you can do the above holistically, for an order of magnitude below their costs, it sounds like I need to get in touch to throw money at you.