4 ms·

afaik, HN's application code is single threaded and wouldn't be able to take advantage of horizontally scaled hardware

• shaneprrlt 3y ago
  An app doesn't need to be multi-threaded to horizontally scale the physical hardware. A load balancer can dispatch requests to multiple single-threaded processes running on individual servers.
  • bhaney 3y ago
    That would result in multiple distinct instances of HN that don't share data. You're thinking of an architecture with a separate central data store that all the instances access and update, but that is not how HN works to my knowledge.
    • shaneprrlt 3y ago
      :mind-blown: Hats off to PG for building an app that could handle 4m requests with the architecture of a small hobby project.
      • foldr 3y ago
        That's just how powerful modern hardware is. You don't need a k8s cluster to run a simple CRUD app under realistic loads. I'm sure the hackernews codebase has acquired some performance optimizations over the years, but I doubt that it's doing anything especially clever performance-wise.