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What is the lowest specs required to handle the HN effect anyways? What is the most retro computer that ever served traffic from HN's top page without going do
by fouc 5y ago
What is the lowest specs required to handle the HN effect anyways?
What is the most retro computer that ever served traffic from HN's top page without going down?
- smoppi 5y agoConsidering that it has to be able to handle about 100 new sockets per second, one socket requires about 1 kB ... 2048 kB (?) of memory depending of the size of the buffers and how the congestion window is implemented[1], I'd say that it would need at least dozens of megabytes of memory and fast I/O. Maybe more depending of the size of the content in the server. Also not all TCP/IP stacks close the socket properly, so the socket cannot just be removed from the memory immediately after sending the page. There will always be sockets that are just waiting for a timeout. [1]my 486 server does not have any TCP congestion control at all - it just sends one TCP frame and waits for ACK before sending the next frame.
- joebob42 5y agoSomeone did a TI something and it seemed to basically work fine as far as I remember.
- fouc 5y agoOh yes I remember now, 6 months ago there was a Casio graphing calculator Fx-9750GII hosting a website https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27814080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27814080 CPU SH3/SH4a, Frequency of CPU 29MHz, RAM 64 Kilobytes Unfortunately it didn't survive HN effect
- tyingq 5y agoMy guess is that memory is probably the big thing. Serving a static file from a buffer cache shouldn't be that taxing on a cpu.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoIt doesn’t really take a powerful server to sustain HN traffic (tens of thousands of requests over a few hours). The problem is that most web server software is really inefficient. A 486 theoretically is capable of handling HN request load, it’s just not being used well.