10 ms·
HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
Rtm has lined up a new, faster server for us. He currently plans to switch over to it at 6 am EST on Saturday. He says the site will be down for around 10 minutes, but you know how these things go...
- byoung2 14y agoJust out of curiosity, what are the specs of the old vs the new server?
- bitops 14y agoIt would be cool to see some performance "brag numbers" posted after the cutover!
- truthhurts 14y agoI wouldn't say performance of HN is anything to brag about. 30+ seconds to login is not exactly fast.
- WALoeIII 14y agoCan you please post a picture of the server so we can see all the sweet LEDs on network cards?
- pg 14y agohttp://imgur.com/VuSH2j5 http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5
- JoshTriplett 14y agoAnd the shiny new server replacing it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_5150.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_51...
- Macsenour 14y agoMy guess was this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpg/280px-Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Com...
- d4vlx 14y agoWhat about http://imgur.com/BOaFPtn http://imgur.com/BOaFPtn So compact yet so powerful.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mindcrime 14y agoI was thinking one of these: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F038812-0014%2C_Wolfsburg%2C_VW_Autowerk.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Bundesarc...
- d4vlx 14y agoAh the good old days, when computers were so simple and yet so mysterious and exciting at the same time.
- tomjen3 14y agoI don't know, I still find them exciting -- although PC hardware isn't as fun as it used to be.
- Thun 14y agoHaha, epic response.
- ericHosick 14y agoI call foul. This doesn't even look like it's powered up. Edit: Wow. 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post. I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag or stick with keeping comments "safe".
- gbog 14y ago> 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post Honest? Then, if I were you, I'd try to be a bit less consensual from time to time. I got plenty of downvotes. I would hope even pg get his share, that would show sane critical thinking.
- melvinmt 14y ago// 3 hours ago · 1,439 views Impressive.
- rayvega 14y agoLove the symmetry of the photo...triangle. (I suspect with the orange background that it was taken at the YC office? http://m.inc.com/?incid=96 http://m.inc.com/?incid=96)
- cubix 14y agoI would have thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LISP_machine.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LISP_machine.jpg
- tomjen3 14y agoThat would have been really cool, and a true hackers machine, but I imagine that the days when LISP needs (or benefits from) custom hardware are long gone.
- MaysonL 14y agoNot one of these? http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-bendix-g15.jpg http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-bendix-g15.jpg [one of the first computer models I ever wrote for - a three address machine: first a source operand, second destination, third address of next instruction. The memory was a rotating drum]
- tomjen3 14y agoMel?
- e1ven 14y agoFor all the flak HN gets about fnid problems, etc, it's still awe-inspiring to me that such a popular site runs on a single server, with so little admintime ;)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brador 14y agoJust how popular is HN? Anyone got info on uniques or pageviews a month?
- GuiA 14y agoAs of October 5th 2011: "Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views." http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html Additionally: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
- pg 14y agoWe currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on weekdays (less on weekends).
- blantonl 14y agoDoes all of HN run on one single server?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- abstractbill 14y agoNot just a single server, a single process on a single core (last time I asked pg at least).
- iamwil 14y agoAnd I recall the last time I looked at the source (when it was released with Arc), it didn't use a database either. All the data is stored as files.
- spoiledtechie 14y agoFiles???? That's a joke right???
- abstractbill 14y agoWhy should it be? You can get a long long way by treating the filesystem as a database. The first engineers at Amazon used the same technique a lot, as do I.
- lowglow 14y ago2,000 startups will be launched on Monday morning as a result of this downtime.
- tomasien 14y agoIt's Friday night. My favorite band (http://www.theanatomyoffrank.com/music http://www.theanatomyoffrank.com/music) is playing a house show in my town, which is the best kind of show because it's BYOB. Then, my best friend from Texas is in town for the night, and we're meeting up. I'm definitely going to go tear it up and create some memories. And yet..... all I can think of is to stay up all night creating a "replacement HN" just for Saturday morning. I just started using Django and it would be perfect for this. Must. Resist. Must. Live. Real. Life.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- larrys 14y agoIn case anyone wondering colo place appears to be The Planet. whois -h whois.arin.net 174.132.225.106 NetRange: 174.132.0.0 - 174.133.255.255 CIDR: 174.132.0.0/15 Name: 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com Address: 174.132.225.106 OriginAS: AS36420, AS30315, AS13749, AS21844 NetName: NETBLK-THEPLANET-BLK-15 NetHandle: NET-174-132-0-0-1 Parent: NET-174-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Allocation RegDate: 2008-06-17 Updated: 2012-02-24 Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-174-132-0-0-1 http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-174-132-0-0-1
- eclipticplane 14y ago*SoftLayer. ThePlanet is no longer, but a lot of their reverse DNS entries still point to .theplanet.com.
- larrys 14y agoI had forgotten that but that was actually a merger: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softlayer-the-planet-complete-merger/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softl... In any case they never got the block changed at arin. We switched providers at one point within the last 6 mos. and the old colo already changed the arin block.
- joezhou 14y agoWhat are we supposed to do on Saturday morning?
- wmf 14y agoLet's be honest here... 6 AM? It's a good time to be asleep.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoThat's 11am in the UK, noon in Western Europe, 4:30pm in India, and 8pm in Japan. Also, it'll be 3am on the West Coast, so some people will still be enjoying their Friday night. http://everytimezone.com/#2013-2-16,-60,6be http://everytimezone.com/#2013-2-16,-60,6be
- weslly 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_morning_cartoon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_morning_cartoon
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoThis is just idle speculation but are there any stats on HN traffic? I have always wondered just how many folks read it, how often etc? I heard a million accounts being bandied around at one point and I cannot tell if that is excessive or not?
- dylangs1030 14y agoIt was said up in the comments. 120k unique IPs per day. 1.3 million page views. source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
- jakub_g 14y agoNewest data straight from pg in this thread: 200k / 2M. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230201 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230201
- goldfeld 14y agoFor a moment there I read "will be shut down". Phew.
- joeblau 14y agoI guess tonight would be the wrong time to post my Show HN project that I've been working on then.
- robbiep 14y agoDo you think you could go down for a week? That's generally how long I need to break an addiction
- ghshephard 14y agoAdd me to the list - I'm in for $100 if we can make it a one week outage. $250 if we can stretch it out to two weeks. I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.
- AdamTReineke 14y agoMy router at home blocks Reddit and HN except from 5-7pm and 11:45-midnight (and all day Saturday). Worked amazingly well to cut back the addiction. Now if I could just get HTTPS blocking to work on FB and Twitter.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- joshmlewis 14y agoI do the same. It works pretty well, it's crazy when you start catching yourself trying to go to one of them by habit.
- AdamTReineke 14y agoI don't know why but I find myself opening new tabs without thinking about it. On Facebook? Ctrl+T, fa, down arrow, enter. Why? Who knows, I was already there... That's when I noticed that I have some major problems.
- JoachimSchipper 14y agoYou can lock yourself out easily with noprocrast and minaway set to a week or two (say 60 x 24 x 10). At least one prominent HN'er claims to have done this when needing a break. Happy to have been of assistance; please send the $250 to GiveWell. ;-)
- jey 14y agoIf even rtm, tenured professor of computer science at MIT, can't escape from sysadmin duty, I really have no hope.
- jacques_chester 14y agoCompared to system administration, being cursed forever is a step up. -- Paul Tomko
- evolve2k 14y agoOh maybe on the maintenance landing page you could post up a big bunch of static links to say the top 50 most voted articles ever! (Or such like). Something like that would keep us busy for a while.
- rdl 14y agoGiven that you've got performance issues and a fairly limiting deployment model, I never understood why you didn't get the most absurdly overpowered machine possible. (I assume you're not, because if you were, you'd be upgrading every ~6mo or so as faster single-core machines come out)
- jrajav 14y agoWould the CPU really be the bottleneck for HN?
- rdl 14y agoI assume it's CPU and cache/memory bandwidth. If I were specing a machine for HN, naively, it would be a competition between a Xeon "enterprise" CPU with huge cache and memory bandwidth (interleaved up) and a gaming/desktop CPU with maxed-out single-core performance. Xeons can do single-core turboboost now, so E5-2690 which goes up to 3.8GHz is probably the best bet, but a desktop i7-3970X 4.0GHz might be an option if you don't need ECC (which also gets you slight speed improvement on memory).
- rikacomet 14y ago10 minutes!? 10 minutes!? oh gosh its okay, I'm just kidding :P
- rikacomet 14y agoyou know this will tickle funny bones more than calm panicked ones right?
- nonamegiven 14y agoWhere will we ask "Is HN down?"
- d0m 14y agoI have a bad habit of checking hackers news to know when my wifi is up or down.. I'm more productive when wifi is down because I'm not tempted to read articles. Saturday will be productivity day!
- bcl 14y agoGeez, could we stop posting these 'site X is down!' threads? Its gotten so bad that they're being posted preemptively. ;)
- thekevinjones 14y agoWell, it looks like I'll be getting 10 minutes of work done I didn't plan on doing.
- kalmar 14y agoWill the beefier machine mean the lifetime of the fnids can be increased? (Funny surprise: the one for this comment box expired before I submitted this comment.)
- GeorgeTirebiter 14y agoHi. Could someone please explain to me why it is necessary for a service (e.g. HN) to go down while people play with the (increasingly amorphous and abstract) back end? Is it 1990? Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.
- tomschlick 14y agoIf you're using a mac http://selfcontrolapp.com/ http://selfcontrolapp.com/ works pretty well.
- tomjen3 14y agoHNs backend isn't very abstract. The site doesn't really use Javascript and resides on a single server. And I agree with you on the windows issue -- except that ten plus years ago I did in fact reboot and/or shut down my computer.
- oijaf888 14y agoBecause the single server that runs it is being turned off and another one is being turned on? Its probably not worth the time to write something to sync processor state from one to the other or clone some sort of vmotion type thing.
- anu_gupta 14y agoWheee - currently much faster, although the true test will be on Monday, around 5pm GMT.