3 ms·

Looks like they’re using “smol” servers; it crashed under a few hundred HN visits ;)

gerikson 3y ago
To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.
- coldpie 3y ago
  My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.
  - throwaway22032 3y ago
    Maybe! In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*. That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the router, modem etc. Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or similar would fit in that budget. * quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at $0.25/kWh you have 50w.
  - zrail 3y ago
    HN traffic is honestly not that much. A recent thread puts it at between 10k and 30k visitors while you're in the top few slots, and assuming that lasts 4 hours or so is on the order of 2-5 rps, probably bursting up to 50 rps or so. Any halfway decent caching proxy is going to handle that without breaking a sweat.
    - aerio 3y ago
      I don't think most smol nets or even people just spinning up a node server behind nginx worry much about caching proxies.
      - floren 3y ago
        My VPS with a gig of memory did fine when it got near the top of the HN front page, no caching proxy, just a Go webserver.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  > When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question, Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an interesting test to see how far it actually scales. [1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- hinkley 3y ago
  One of my major beefs with IT conversations is the stubborn adherence to the manufacturing notion of 'economies of scale'. That's not how algorithms work. Most of the things we do are nlogn complexity. There are lots of breakpoints where 10x as many users cost you 11x as much in hardware, and we pretend it's going to cost us 8x. Any time your estimates are off by 40% should trigger your root cause analysis protocol. In particular we are lousy at statistics. We have to be right in the middle of the consequences of misreading them before we act. When you have 10 servers you might have to deal with a deployment race condition once a month. When you have 30 servers you might have to deal with one every week. That starts to materially affect your estimates when you have five of those sorts of things going on.
- nathants 3y ago
  cloudflare workers + r2 is shockingly affordable.
rcxdude 3y ago
Not surprising considering there's a rant about the resource usage from web crawlers

To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.

coldpie 3y ago
My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  Maybe! In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*. That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the router, modem etc. Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or similar would fit in that budget. * quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at $0.25/kWh you have 50w.
- zrail 3y ago
  HN traffic is honestly not that much. A recent thread puts it at between 10k and 30k visitors while you're in the top few slots, and assuming that lasts 4 hours or so is on the order of 2-5 rps, probably bursting up to 50 rps or so. Any halfway decent caching proxy is going to handle that without breaking a sweat.
  - aerio 3y ago
    I don't think most smol nets or even people just spinning up a node server behind nginx worry much about caching proxies.
    - floren 3y ago
      My VPS with a gig of memory did fine when it got near the top of the HN front page, no caching proxy, just a Go webserver.
the_third_wave 3y ago
> When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question, Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an interesting test to see how far it actually scales. [1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
hinkley 3y ago
One of my major beefs with IT conversations is the stubborn adherence to the manufacturing notion of 'economies of scale'. That's not how algorithms work. Most of the things we do are nlogn complexity. There are lots of breakpoints where 10x as many users cost you 11x as much in hardware, and we pretend it's going to cost us 8x. Any time your estimates are off by 40% should trigger your root cause analysis protocol. In particular we are lousy at statistics. We have to be right in the middle of the consequences of misreading them before we act. When you have 10 servers you might have to deal with a deployment race condition once a month. When you have 30 servers you might have to deal with one every week. That starts to materially affect your estimates when you have five of those sorts of things going on.
nathants 3y ago
cloudflare workers + r2 is shockingly affordable.

rcxdude 3y ago

Not surprising considering there's a rant about the resource usage from web crawlers