5 ms·

There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If

There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png https://ttm.sh/ix3.png

smoe 5y ago
I'm actually quite surprised and impressed that I was able to open the site and leave a message while this is on the frontpage!
- lowercasename 5y ago
  I've been resetting it every 2 minutes! This is how regular servers work, right?
  - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    Not far off, in some cases.
  - gibolt 5y ago
    Having multiple unstable boxes and just cycling them round robin style is a valid solution, depending on the use case
  - npteljes 5y ago
    We really did that when we discovered a memory leak that manifested itself over some days, and that we couldn't find the root cause of. We just did a rolling reboot daily when the visitor count was bottoming out.
Aachen 5y ago
HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge. People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", presumably because more people read HN than post on HN so most will just never have tried, and even fewer people try without some preparation (you don't know for sure that it was unnecessary if nothing went wrong). If one's pages don't require a lot of (pre)computation and you're not a huge destination on the web, things like load balancers, server clusters, etc. are a waste of time and money. But not using fancy tech is not what people here like to geek out on so...
- lowercasename 5y ago
  Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN was the first time it experienced that many. Something is clearly amiss!
  - Aachen 5y ago
    Sure, I didn't mean to dismiss that it's a good test for custom software on embedded hardware :). More of a general remark that it seems most people's perception is that HN does some good "hugging" and that I think this is a misconception - unless, of course, you run ultra low power. Kudos for doing exactly that!
    - lowercasename 5y ago
      You're right - this was my impression too! You read a few dramatic posts about being hugged and you get this idea that HN is a behemoth that DDoSes everything it loves. Thanks for the context!
  - jart 5y ago
    Are you doing SSL on that Solar Arduino? Try using only the ciphersuite RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA256 with a 1024 bit RSA key.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Sure, but - and I say this with considerable respect because it in no way detracts from the impressiveness of the work - that's clearly a bug, and I would hope most production web servers don't fall over quite that easily.
- jart 5y ago
  That's because people are so accustomed to leveraging mountains of free candy that they've forgotten that a web page can be served with less than 1000ms of cpu time. I got a job once when I told a story about a web app I wrote was going viral getting a million visitors a day while I was strolling in the park. The web servers I write only need a single system call (writev) to serve gzip encoded assets so wrk says they can do a million requests per second on one pc. So it's not like it was any kind of big technical achievement even though it was a technical job. My point is that we're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it.

smoe 5y ago

I'm actually quite surprised and impressed that I was able to open the site and leave a message while this is on the frontpage!

lowercasename 5y ago
I've been resetting it every 2 minutes! This is how regular servers work, right?
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  Not far off, in some cases.
- gibolt 5y ago
  Having multiple unstable boxes and just cycling them round robin style is a valid solution, depending on the use case
- npteljes 5y ago
  We really did that when we discovered a memory leak that manifested itself over some days, and that we couldn't find the root cause of. We just did a rolling reboot daily when the visitor count was bottoming out.

Aachen 5y ago

HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge. People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", presumably because more people read HN than post on HN so most will just never have tried, and even fewer people try without some preparation (you don't know for sure that it was unnecessary if nothing went wrong). If one's pages don't require a lot of (pre)computation and you're not a huge destination on the web, things like load balancers, server clusters, etc. are a waste of time and money. But not using fancy tech is not what people here like to geek out on so...

lowercasename 5y ago
Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN was the first time it experienced that many. Something is clearly amiss!
- Aachen 5y ago
  Sure, I didn't mean to dismiss that it's a good test for custom software on embedded hardware :). More of a general remark that it seems most people's perception is that HN does some good "hugging" and that I think this is a misconception - unless, of course, you run ultra low power. Kudos for doing exactly that!
  - lowercasename 5y ago
    You're right - this was my impression too! You read a few dramatic posts about being hugged and you get this idea that HN is a behemoth that DDoSes everything it loves. Thanks for the context!
- jart 5y ago
  Are you doing SSL on that Solar Arduino? Try using only the ciphersuite RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA256 with a 1024 bit RSA key.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Sure, but - and I say this with considerable respect because it in no way detracts from the impressiveness of the work - that's clearly a bug, and I would hope most production web servers don't fall over quite that easily.
jart 5y ago
That's because people are so accustomed to leveraging mountains of free candy that they've forgotten that a web page can be served with less than 1000ms of cpu time. I got a job once when I told a story about a web app I wrote was going viral getting a million visitors a day while I was strolling in the park. The web servers I write only need a single system call (writev) to serve gzip encoded assets so wrk says they can do a million requests per second on one pc. So it's not like it was any kind of big technical achievement even though it was a technical job. My point is that we're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it.