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Like so many people you underestimate the capacity of modern computers. Stack Overflow is famously hosted on like 6 machines. I personally worked on a system th

Like so many people you underestimate the capacity of modern computers. Stack Overflow is famously hosted on like 6 machines. I personally worked on a system that was running on two machines, one a hot backup, that served highly dynamic content to 400k monthly actives.

renewiltord 3y ago
I think you underestimate software engineers. I can bring a 64 core 512 GiB machine to its knees with a trivial program. Imagine what I could do when I'm trying to be productive.
- api 3y ago
  This is called Eroom's Law: "Software bloat increases until it consumes all gains from Moore's Law."
api 3y ago
As with "big data," the threshold for what qualifies as "hyperscale" increases exponentially with time. Hyperscale 10 years ago can be served from a few machines at Hetzner today... if you write efficient software. Big data of 10 years ago can be analyzed on a laptop today. 10 years from now you'll probably be able to host today's Twitter from a shelf in your basement if you could get enough bandwidth. That being said all this is predicated on efficient software. Unfortunately I don’t get the impression the fediverse stuff is that efficient. Isn’t at least some of it Ruby, the slowest platform available? If it were Go, Rust, Java, etc it’d probably be handling the load a lot better. Even PHP is faster by far.
- porphyra 3y ago
  Lemmy is implemented in Rust I thought EDIT: here's a good discussion: https://programming.dev/comment/133415 https://programming.dev/comment/133415
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Part of Lemmy is Rust. And then for some reason the web-ui has both a frontend and a backend component as well, and the backend component of the web-ui is written in Javascript. I wonder to which extent this negatively impacts the perf of Lemmy.
willcipriano 3y ago
I feel like a simple cache could've saved the day here. The homepage could be canned so at least it loads.

renewiltord 3y ago

I think you underestimate software engineers. I can bring a 64 core 512 GiB machine to its knees with a trivial program. Imagine what I could do when I'm trying to be productive.

api 3y ago
This is called Eroom's Law: "Software bloat increases until it consumes all gains from Moore's Law."

api 3y ago

As with "big data," the threshold for what qualifies as "hyperscale" increases exponentially with time. Hyperscale 10 years ago can be served from a few machines at Hetzner today... if you write efficient software. Big data of 10 years ago can be analyzed on a laptop today. 10 years from now you'll probably be able to host today's Twitter from a shelf in your basement if you could get enough bandwidth. That being said all this is predicated on efficient software. Unfortunately I don’t get the impression the fediverse stuff is that efficient. Isn’t at least some of it Ruby, the slowest platform available? If it were Go, Rust, Java, etc it’d probably be handling the load a lot better. Even PHP is faster by far.

porphyra 3y ago
Lemmy is implemented in Rust I thought EDIT: here's a good discussion: https://programming.dev/comment/133415 https://programming.dev/comment/133415
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Part of Lemmy is Rust. And then for some reason the web-ui has both a frontend and a backend component as well, and the backend component of the web-ui is written in Javascript. I wonder to which extent this negatively impacts the perf of Lemmy.

willcipriano 3y ago

I feel like a simple cache could've saved the day here. The homepage could be canned so at least it loads.