4 ms·
Yay! Hacker News is on a new and improved server now.
"We're down for (we hope) a few minutes while switching to a new server."
... and they are back.
Thank you pg, rtm and everyone who made this happen.
- pg 18y agoYes, should be a lot faster. We're now just trying to kill the old one cleanly...
- kirubakaran 18y agoIt definitely feels much faster. Thanks again pg!
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- kirubakaran 18y ago"for now" would be my guess. But if Obama mentions us on his State of the Union...
- pg 18y agoLooks like everything went well. Handy having Robert Morris as your sysadmin. The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for me in about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-in users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted. There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory at once again. We should be good for another year or so.
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- aaronblohowiak 18y agoThanks! Also, for those of us who don't know who Robert Morris is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris * MIT Prof * creator of first internet worm * cofounder of viaweb and ycombinator
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- cperciva 18y agoformer chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency That's rtm's father, not rtm.
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoThanks, updated.
- alecco 18y agoMan, what I'd give to have a chat one day with RTM. So many questions. :)
- cperciva 18y agoAs a cryptographer, I'd rather talk to RM senior -- but as an NSA alumnus, I don't think he'd want to talk to me. :-)
- pg 18y agoApply to YC, and if you make it to interviews you can get grilled by him in person.
- tdavis 18y agoI seem to recall most exchanges going thusly: pg: Robert, do you have anything to add? rtm: No. Though he did talk during the interview. In this age of Twitter he's my hero.
- breck 18y agoAre you planning on pointing the domain to the new server or just using 174.132.225.106? It could solve the growth problem, perhaps?
- pg 18y agonews.ycombinator.com already points to the new ip address. The message with that ip addr in it will only be seen by people who still have the old ip cached in their browser. (Obviously for them we have to refer to the new server by its ip addr.)
- vaksel 18y agowonder what the server specs are...for both the new and the old one
- rtm 18y agoOld: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3. New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.
- cperciva 18y agoYou were running FreeBSD 5.3 until recently? You know it reached its EoL at the end of October 2006, right? There have been lots of security issues over the past 2.5 years which weren't fixed in FreeBSD 5.3. And by "FreeBSD 7.1" you mean 7.1-RELEASE-p3, right? :-)
- vaksel 18y agothanks
- lsb 18y agoSo, if you've got all those in-memory data structures, there are lots of lists of pointers to objects. How does it compare on a 32-bit OS, with 32-bit pointers, vs a 64-bit with 64-bit pointers?
- cperciva 18y agoI'd guess that most of the memory is used by blocks of text which are much larger than the pointers which reference them, so probably the size_t expansion has a minimal impact on the total memory usage.
- jwilliams 18y agoThat's true, but 64 bit will affect other things as well - pointer size goes up, your stack will be bigger and the packing (alignment) of your structures changes. If your compiler is unfriendly, your structure size can change significantly -- afaik, GCC is pretty clever about structure packing, but I'd imagine it varies a lot depending on the architecture.
- rvirding 18y agoPerhaps if they had been running Erlang on the server you wouldn't have had to take the site down while migrating to a new server. Sorry just had to point this out
- cperciva 18y agoErlang isn't a magic bullet. It might make migrating processes fast, but it won't speed up migrating data.
- ciupicri 18y agoIndeed, but I think that he was trying to say that Erlang could have made this process more transparent for the users, without any disruption.
- moe 18y agoOut of curiousity, does erlang really support that kind of hot migration of running processes along with their data? Until now I only knew that erlang can span multiple hosts - but only when you wrote your application that way? What has really helped us in terms of machine migration (but at the cost of additional overhead) is running stuff inside Xen and OpenVZ virtual machines. Those can really be migrated seamlessly - often without a noticable downtime.
- oomkiller 18y agoErlang supports hot code migration, which allows you to use your new code in each process AFTER you merge the new code in. The processes that were running when you merged the new code will still be using the old code, until they end execution. This isnt really that big of an issue if you write your code in the erlang-way, which is using as many processes as you can to spread data, and then passing messages between the different processes. In this situation,each HTTP session would probably be running the old code, but each new one created would be running the new code.
- airlabam 18y ago
- tlrobinson 18y agoSo we just finished a new round of optimizations as part of our ongoing quest to prove that with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests with arbitrarily slow languages. http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09 http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09 Is that quest over, or is upgrading the server fair game? :)
- pg 18y agoNo, I'm sure I can squeeze out a lot more performance. But I have a lot of other stuff going on at the moment (Demo Day is this week, among other things) so it is nice to be able to buy my way out of trouble for a change.
- patio11 18y agowith sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests Note the collorary: with a sufficient business model you can earn arbitrarily large amounts of money relative to hardware costs. Which always makes me wonder why the clooooooooooooud gets so much press for cost reduction. If your application doesn't value data by weight (or worse, values data at 0), your hosting costs are going to be rounding error. Reducing the rounding error to half-sized doesn't strike me as the number one best use of time for the majority of businesses.
- tlrobinson 18y agoTrue, though reduced hardware cost is only part of the promise of cloud computing. Elastic scalability is a major advantages in some cases, allowing you to rapidly scale up (and back down) while minimizing waste. "The cloud" absorbs the fluctuations. Easy deployment and thus reduced administrative costs might be another. With EC2, etc that's might not be the case, since you still have to set up the OS images and other infrastructure yourself, but things like Heroku might help.
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- blueben 18y agoWhy "server" instead of "servers"?
- EliAndrewC 18y agoTypically sites with multiple servers put there web and database server software on different machines. Hacker News doesn't use a database and stores everything in memory, so this wouldn't make any sense for this codebase.