9 ms·
HN ran on a single box in 2018 has anything changed?
- fouc 5y agoIt's now deployed to fly.io because edge nodes are important. /s
- yardie 5y agoI'm curious to find out as well. I feel most websites can run on a single instance with decent caching. But owners want reliability and that adds complexity, cost, and technical debt.
- skilled 5y agoYC has fallen on hard times. HN now runs on a Raspberry Pi.
- xeromal 5y agoI heard it was a thumbdrive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eric__cartman 5y agoLet's pool up funds and buy YC a flash drive to backup the SD card in case of a file system corruption.
- tomfanning 5y agoPSA: Pi 4 + M.2 SATA SSD + USB3 adapter is blisteringly fast. No micro SD card needed any more. Runs Ubuntu x64 and Docker. Even better with a heat-dissipating case with an integrated M.2 SATA port in the bottom, like the Argon ONE M.2. I use mine to run multiple .NET 6 microservices, and it's replaced an entire HP Microserver. The entire Pi setup will have paid for itself in under a year in energy savings alone.
- hedora 5y agoKey to that is "x64", though I assume you meant Arm 64. I recently had an important infrastructure service die a dumpster fire of a death because it uses mongo, which quietly disables its journal on 32 bit operating systems. (Restored from backup, fwiw.)
- jd_mongodb 5y agoWhat version of MongoDB are you running? The mainstream MongoDB storage engine (WiredTiger) only supports 64bit systems.
- shaicoleman 5y agodang confirmed a few months ago it's still the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 Also, it's still using the Arc programming language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483639
- ineedasername 5y agoPft. They have two boxes, a master & standby. Real gamers play on permadeath.
- krapp 5y agoActually HN is served from Sam Altman's fitbit now.
- podge 5y agoWith that in mind I wonder what the uptime % of HN is, and if the master/standby setup involves automatic failover.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoIn all my years, HN has been down just once.
- jacob019 5y agoI notice short term outages every couple months. They usually don't last long.
- deckard1 5y agoI wonder if Reddit is ever going to fix their "you broke reddit" thing. I probably see that page a couple dozen times a year, and it's been going on since, what, 2014? Earlier maybe? It's like the Twitter fail whale. Except Twitter fixed their site.
- sleepingadmin 5y agoHN was upgraded incrementally over the years. It is now synthesized on global platforms to seize the viral e-markets and aggregate brand schemas on the bleeding edge despite all the challenges in the supply chain. edit/sorry was joking. I dont know anything about anything.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axegon_ 5y agoThere is something comical about this: HN receives an absurd amount of traffic. More than startups and corporations with millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars behind them, and yet it runs on effectively an arduino nano compared to what they are using. HN serves all the contents significantly faster than any of them at the fraction of the time and cost. Let's take my old job for instance: the company website had almost nothing on it: a list of products, a jobs page and that's it. That website ran on 12(yes, twelve) dell servers, each having a 4 socket motherboard, each occupied by a 12 core xeon, and each of those servers had 384 gigs of ram. Sure, it tracked every click and whatnot but the data that was tracked was never actually used and the all-beloved bundle.min.js was 15 megabytes. So much for low carbon footprint and all that...
- brimble 5y agoIt also fails gracefully. Logged-in users may find the site unusable while it still loads for logged-out readers just fine (from cache).
- sulam 5y ago6M requests a day. Assuming a "US East Coast dominates" traffic pattern which is typical for this kind of site, that means their rps probably spikes north of 10K, but I'd be surprised if it's over 50K. I disagree that startups with millions of customers handle less traffic. There are probably some exceptions that prove the rule, but once you're into millions of customers you are most likely over 50K rps at peak times.
- zozbot234 5y agoMost startups with "millions of customers" can also trivially shard their traffic so it can effectively run on a bunch of largely-independent boxes, with some added redundancy for reliability's sake. No need for anything more complex.
- sulam 5y agoLet's say "trivially shard most of their traffic" and I can agree. Product managers are constantly coming with cool ideas that are hard to shard.
- jeffbee 5y agoIt looks like HN gets about 1-2 submissions per minute and ~10s of comments per minute, although I imagine the daily Joe Rogan argument attracts more than the average. Then there’s the votes. I would ballpark the average mutation rate at ~1/s. Who would doubt it is possible to host this on one box?
- wglb 5y agoI think it is more than that. On Feb 4 (cst) I count 14796 submissions. (Comments and stories). So it is more like 10 per minute.
- brimble 5y ago> Who would doubt it is possible to host this on one box? People who've never stood up a "bare-metal" server in their life. Who weren't around to see the kind of traffic one shitty late-90s commodity-parts server with slow memory and maybe two processors if you're very lucky and spinning-rust drives, could handle when tuned properly and without horrendously bloated software or being subjected to a pile of bad DB queries written by people who haven't the first clue what they're doing.
- the_biot 5y agoHear, hear! As much as I adore setting up and managing systems that scale well, not everything needs massive clusters of hardware run by software that's designed to scale to the millions. Skilled system administration goes a long way.
- brimble 5y agoIt probably didn't come across in my post (I see on re-reading it) but I wasn't trying to shit on people who haven't had that kind of experience. I think VM/container performance in modern software ecosystems (and especially on shared hardware, which is typical "in the cloud") is so bad that lots of people just genuinely don't realize what kind of workload the hardware itself is cabable of serving, and so are consistently surprised when a single server—much faster than a typical server circa, say, 1999—is happily serving a not-even-that-large workload. It's not their fault, just a difference in experience and some... very good marketing, I'd say.
- _zllx 5y agoI'm curious about the database tech behind HN. I've heard before that it's Firebase, but that struck me as odd. Anyone have some enlightening comments from the past? Not sure what to type in the Algolia search.
- r6203 5y agoIt's Firebase. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- kogir 5y agoThat’s just the API. I no longer work on HN, but as of 2016 it was still flat files (s-exprs) on a ZFS dataset.
- krapp 5y agoThere is no database, except in the very general sense. Hacker News stores data as Arc lisp tables in flat files or in memory - in fact, the forum is meant to serve as a MVP for the language itself. See my previous comment in this thread or search "Arc Lisp" and you can find the current distribution of the code and forum software HN is based on. But bear in mind Hacker News itself is somewhat proprietary for business reasons.
- adamddev1 5y agoI am still baffled by how so many are always assuming that running everything serverless/kubernetes/edge nodes etc is always the best for for performance... because it's 2022. For example, people talk about deploying things on Vercel because of the performance benefits. I found Vercel was waaay slower than just hosting my Next.js app (w backend API) on a VPS. (Even after getting past the cold starts on Vercel.) Just throwing it on a single server (even if it's far away) made the app feel so incredibly snappy and fast.
- runevault 5y agoBoth performance and complexity cost. Yes if you are google/amazon/fb scale you basically have to pay the complexity cost because of how many users/how much money downtime costs/etc. Most businesses are not nearly on that scale. Last I knew StackOverflow was running on 2 webservers and one DB server or the like. Most companies are not even at SO's scale.
- rcpt 5y agoI thought the advantages of those things are deployment and reproducibility. Otherwise it's easy to find yourself in a situation like my last job where unit tests only passed on the CEOs laptop and nobody knows why
- adamddev1 5y agoWell yes that's a part of it. (I solved that problem by deploying w Docker personally.) But I think beyond that there's also this idea that it will be faster on serverless.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- acheron 5y agoI figured HN probably ran on an old desktop tower under somebody's desk, with a post-it note on it that says "DO NOT REBOOT!!!!"
- oefrha 5y agoIn fact, restarting the server is or was the only way to fix at least one bug on HN.[1] Pretty sure I've seen it as late as last year, and dang confirmed the fix was still the same. (I know, restarting the server != rebooting the machine.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228692
- pvg 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23472870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23472870
- acheron 5y agoLol, yes. Maybe we’ve worked at the same places.
- bierjunge 5y agoThis reminds me of my old workplace. Government owned company where everything was running on MS Excel, SAP, fax machines [0] and prayers from operative IT office. I had to go to one of the more "exotic" server rooms, placed in a basement and saw a very old desktop stuffed on the bottom of a rack. Covered with dust, open side panels, plastic turned yellow, you know how old and forgotten hardware looks like. This had a new-ish post-it with the message: "this runs all of the fax infrastructure. you turn it off, you explain it to the CEO". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
- robbedpeter 5y agoI worked for a company that had acquired a B-list, top 20 mmorpg - its database was mssql and had been running 24/7 for 5 years, with no way to back it up, no safety net, and an increasingly pissed off player community suffering degrading service. Everyone was terrified to reboot. They started bouncing paychecks before I got to see the drama come to a head, but I'm obsessive about proper levels of redundancy anymore. Don't build fragility into a system, and at least leave yourself a means to fail gracefully.
- keehun 5y agoI would love to contribute night mode to HN. It's my least favorite thing about reading the fantastic discussions here. Anyone have ideas on how I can go about doing that?
- colinwilyb 5y agoBrowser plugin which applies custom CSS?
- freeqaz 5y agoWhat about on mobile?
- entropicdrifter 5y agoFirefox Mobile supports plugins. You save a ton of battery life just running UBlock Origin with it
- zorr 5y agoFirefox on Android has some plugins that can do this.
- kitsune_cw 5y agoOn Android, I've been using Kiwi Browser [0]. It's Chrome but supports extensions from the webstore like desktop chrome, and has a dark mode toggle in the menu that applies custom CSS to webpages. Also has devtools, bottom navigation bar, and a setting to disable tab grouping. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowser.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
- throwjs51009 5y agoUse Firefox with 'Ublock Origin' and add one of the following to it's 'My Filters' section: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ycombinator.com%23%23html%3Astyle%28background-color%3A%20%233e3e42%20%21important&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- yardie 5y agoWhile crossing the Atlantic ocean there were only a few domains whitelisted for our Iridium Go satellite modem. Email, obviously. Predictwind, for weather, and Hacker News. Bandwidth maxed at 2400bps (yes, really) and HN was the only news site I trusted not to overload my dripping faucet of an internet connection. The modems built-in browser stripped HN down to the bare minimum to be legible. I really appreciate the thought that goes into making a lightweight, information heavy site.
- slimeboty 5y agodoes HN use a heavy cache layer? I assume not because every comment made would not be visible until cache expired. Unless they have a way to expire the cache (which is not dependable on most CDNs?)