6 ms·

StackOverflow still just runs on a pair of (beefy) SQL servers. Modern web engineering is a joke.

by alex_sf 4y ago

dizhn 4y ago
I belive hackernews itself is a couple of servers too.
- winrid 4y ago
  One big server with a flat text file DB on NVME drives AFAIK.
  - amiga-workbench 4y ago
    I believe the application code is single threaded due to its interpreter too.
    - TremendousJudge 4y ago
      it does run pretty slow under load though, and they have acknowledged it's due to this
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        HN has mutable data though. That's a much harder problem than indexing a large amount of static data like a search engine.
    - winrid 4y ago
      Not only that, but I don't think the custom datastore handles concurrent writes. One thread FTW. :)
- hedora 4y ago
  Wikipedia too.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    That doesn't sound right: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_at_WMF https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_at_WMF
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  dang? Bueller? Anyone?
- maxbond 4y ago
  I think HN's stack is the right choice for them and that it fulfills its purpose excellently, but I do seem to recall both of their hard drives failing more or less simultaneously & HN going down for about 8 hours not that long ago. If that happened at the SaaS company I worked at previously, it would be a bloodbath. The churn would be huge. And our customer's customers would be churning from them. If that happened at a particularly inopportune time, like while we'd been raising money or something, it could potentially endanger the company. (I'd like to stress again this is not a criticism of HN/dang, but just to illustrate a set of requirements where huge AWS spends do make sense.)
- wyre 4y ago
  I read once Reddit is just one big sql database
  - zerkten 3y ago
    Reddit was using Cassandra in 2010 (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_now_running_on_cassandra/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_...). The experience was mentioned on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694461. I expect that they started with an RDBMS and made various moves over the years.
nemo44x 4y ago
A lot of modern web engineering is built for problems most people won't have.
- nine_k 4y ago
  The people strive to have these problems! Hockey stick growth, servers melting under signup requests, payment systems struggling under the stream of subscription payments! Scale up, up, up! And for that you might want to run your setup under k8s since day one, just in case, even though a single inexpensive server would run the whole thing with a 5x capacity reserve. But that would feel like a side project, not a startup!
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  I'd argue that a lot of modern web engineering pretends to be built for problems must people won't have. So much resume-driven-development is being done on making select, easy parts super scalable while ignoring some elephants in the room such as the datastore. A good example is the obsession with "fast" web frameworks on your application servers, completely ignoring the fact that your database will be the first to give up even in most "heavy" web frameworks' default configurations without any optimization efforts.

StackOverflow still just runs on a pair of (beefy) SQL servers. Modern web engineering is a joke.

dizhn 4y ago

I belive hackernews itself is a couple of servers too.

winrid 4y ago
One big server with a flat text file DB on NVME drives AFAIK.
- amiga-workbench 4y ago
  I believe the application code is single threaded due to its interpreter too.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    it does run pretty slow under load though, and they have acknowledged it's due to this
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      HN has mutable data though. That's a much harder problem than indexing a large amount of static data like a search engine.
  - winrid 4y ago
    Not only that, but I don't think the custom datastore handles concurrent writes. One thread FTW. :)
hedora 4y ago
Wikipedia too.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  That doesn't sound right: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_at_WMF https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_at_WMF
bookofjoe 4y ago
dang? Bueller? Anyone?
maxbond 4y ago
I think HN's stack is the right choice for them and that it fulfills its purpose excellently, but I do seem to recall both of their hard drives failing more or less simultaneously & HN going down for about 8 hours not that long ago. If that happened at the SaaS company I worked at previously, it would be a bloodbath. The churn would be huge. And our customer's customers would be churning from them. If that happened at a particularly inopportune time, like while we'd been raising money or something, it could potentially endanger the company. (I'd like to stress again this is not a criticism of HN/dang, but just to illustrate a set of requirements where huge AWS spends do make sense.)
wyre 4y ago
I read once Reddit is just one big sql database
- zerkten 3y ago
  Reddit was using Cassandra in 2010 (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_now_running_on_cassandra/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_...). The experience was mentioned on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694461. I expect that they started with an RDBMS and made various moves over the years.

nemo44x 4y ago

A lot of modern web engineering is built for problems most people won't have.

nine_k 4y ago
The people strive to have these problems! Hockey stick growth, servers melting under signup requests, payment systems struggling under the stream of subscription payments! Scale up, up, up! And for that you might want to run your setup under k8s since day one, just in case, even though a single inexpensive server would run the whole thing with a 5x capacity reserve. But that would feel like a side project, not a startup!
Nextgrid 3y ago
I'd argue that a lot of modern web engineering pretends to be built for problems must people won't have. So much resume-driven-development is being done on making select, easy parts super scalable while ignoring some elephants in the room such as the datastore. A good example is the obsession with "fast" web frameworks on your application servers, completely ignoring the fact that your database will be the first to give up even in most "heavy" web frameworks' default configurations without any optimization efforts.