3 ms·

I belive hackernews itself is a couple of servers too.

by dizhn 4y ago

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 4y 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.

I belive hackernews itself is a couple of servers too.

by 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 4y 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.